Book Reviews
(Notable Book of the Year) This engaging, entertaining first novel concerns a huge Irish Catholic family; its focus is the coming of age of Maggie Scanlan, age 13.
New York Times
Anna Quindlen's first novel is about an experience that is the same for everyone and different for us all: the time when we suddenly see our family with an outsider's eye and begin the separation that marks our growing up.... Quindlen knows that all the things we ever will be can be found in some forgotten fragment of family.
Washington Post Book World
Readers of her "Life in the 30s" column in the New York Times (collected in Living Out Loud ) know Quindlen as an astute observer of family relationships. Her first novel is solid proof that she is equally discerning and skillful as a writer of fiction. To sensitive Maggie Scanlan, the summer when she turns 13 is "the time when her whole life changed." Aware that her father, Tommy, had outraged the wealthy Scanlan clan by marrying the daughter of an Italian cemetery caretaker, Maggie is a bridge between her "outcast" mother and her grandfather, whose favorite she is. Domineering, irascible, intolerant John Scanlan looks down on both Pope John XXII and President Kennedy for deviating from traditional Catholic doctrine. His iron hand crushes his wife and grown children, and when he decides that Maggie's parents and their soon-to-be-five offspring should move from their slightly shabby Irish Catholic Bronx suburb to a large house in Westchester which he has purchased for them, tension between her parents escalates and Maggie's loyalties are tested. But other unexpected events—her grandfather's stroke, her mother's attraction to a man of her own background, her best friend's defection, her first boyfriend—serve both to unsettle Maggie and to propel her across the threshold to adulthood. Quindlen's social antennae are acute: she conveys the fierce ethnic pride that distinguishes Irish and Italian communities, their rivalry and mutual disdain. Her character portrayal is empathetic and beautifully dimensional, not only of Maggie but of her mother, who experiences her own wrenching rite of passage. This absorbing coming-of-age novel will draw comparisons with the works of Mary Gordon, but Quindlen is a writer with her own voice and finely honed perceptions.
Publishers Weekly
This first novel by former New York Times columnist, and now syndicated columnist, Quindlen is a well-written but not particularly engaging reflection on growing up. Maggie Scanlan, product of an Irish father and an Italian mother, lives in a New York City suburb in the 1960s. We follow her through her 12th summer, as she endures the trials and tribulations of the transition to adolescence. Maggie is not particularly insightful, though, and none of the other characters give her much insight into growing up. The characters themselves are not as lively as they might be, and the plot is standard: marriage problems, family quarrels, a problem pregnancy. —Gwen Gregory, U.S. Courts Lib., Phoenix, AZ
Library Journal
This first novel is an insightful family chronicle, an informed commentary on the '60s, and the coming-of-age depiction of a mother and daughter. As 13-year-old Maggie struggles with her identity within the boisterous Scanlan clan, her mother also finds her own place within the patriarchal family that has never accepted her. Both women experience rites of passage during the fateful summer that a housing development is being built behind their home, infringing on their emotional and physical spaces. A fast-paced plot involves small fires set in the development by Maggie's friends and romantic tension between her mother and a man from her past. Readers will appreciate Maggie's dilemmas as she grapples with peer pressure and sexual bewilderment, and as she begins to understand her mother, whose discontent oddly parallels her own. —Jackie Gropman, Richard Byrd Library, Springfield, VA
School Library Journal
An affecting, if slightly predictable, first novel about a young girl's coming of age from popular New York Times columnist Quindlen (the nonfiction collection Living Out Loud, 1988). The time is a summer in the early 1960's, and the place is Kenwood, a small town just outside of the Bronx. For Maggie Scanlan, it is the summer of big changes—the fields behind her house are chopped up to make way for a subdivision; her powerful grandfather, John Scanlan, has a stroke and is hospitalized; her mother, Connie, gets pregnant again and learns to drive a car; and, finally, Maggie herself changes. She celebrates her 13th birthday, officially becoming a teen-ager. But, as it turns out, these are only the obvious changes. What really stirs Maggie are the things nobody talks about: the shifting of power in the Scanlan family, her mother's preoccupation with another man, her cousin Monica's pregnancy, and the example and advice of a neighbor, Helen Malone. All of this seems inextricably linked, somehow, to the building going on behind Maggie's house, so that even years later, whenever she smells "the peculiar odor of new construction, of pine planking and plastic plumbing pipes," she is taken back to this troubling, mystifying and, ultimately, liberating summer. The Scanlan family is a richly complicated group—from grandpa, who had made a fortune manufacturing religious paraphernalia, to Maggie's father, the black sheep of the family, stubbornly independent. Quindlen never lets these characters sink into stereotype, and while her writing here seems somewhat less charged than in her columns, her talent for revealing the small, hard truths of family life is plenty apparent. Not a new recipe, but the best kind of home cooking, simply served, with plenty to chew on.
Kirkus Reviews