Besides the mostly off-stage issue of a parent’s severe illness there’s not much here to challenge most readers-driving, beer-drinking, divorce, a moment of surprise at the mothers smoking medicinal pot together. In the background the two mothers renew their friendship each year, and Lauren, Belly’s mother, provides support for her friend-if not, unfortunately, for the children-in Susannah’s losing battle with breast cancer. Belly’s dawning awareness of her sexuality and that of the boys is a strong theme, as is the sense of summer as a separate and reflective time and place: Readers get glimpses of kisses on the beach, her best friend’s flirtations during one summer’s visit, a first date. Han’s leisurely paced, somewhat somber narrative revisits several beach-house summers in flashback through the eyes of now 15-year-old Isabel, known to all as Belly.īelly measures her growing self by these summers and by her lifelong relationship with the older boys, her brother and her mother’s best friend’s two sons.
Gradually, as she campaigns for her own imperfections, she begins to see the Shakers as individuals, too, all trying to cover the imperfections that are the essence of their humanity in doing so, she makes peace with her place in the Shaker village and her future outside it. While Isaac’s anxiety leads him to embrace every Shaker rule, Rosemary fights back, making artistic but imperfect brooms and arguing that kittens should be allowed in the barns, narrating her rebellion in a homespun, present-tense voice. Rosemary-now Sister Bess-must sleep on her back, hands folded across her chest she must always walk with her right foot first and take everything with her right hand.
Shakers believe they live in Heaven on earth, where humans must submit to perfect order. It’s also the prison to which their mother has abandoned them.
For 14-year-old Rosemary, her little brother, Isaac, and her baby sister, Anne, the Shaker village of Pleasant Hill, Ky., is a clean haven and welcome refuge from their father’s abuse and the violence of the Civil War.
0 kommentar(er)
