Books about Issues with Families and Parents
Reviews by Ms. Belben
Updated December 2006

Anderson, Laurie Halse. Catalyst. © 2002 (Fiction/Young Adult)
High school senior Kate Malone is an over-achiever:  a gifted student who loves science and math and hopes to go to MIT.  She wants to go to MIT so much, in fact, that it is the only school she’s applied to—but she hasn’t told anyone that.

Pressures on Kate abound.  Her father, a charismatic but often over-booked preacher, needs Kate’s help around the church and around the house, since her mother has been dead for years and her younger brother, Toby, has allergies and asthma that often leave him very ill.  Kate’s boyfriend, Mitch, is her soul-mate, but when Kate isn’t accepted to MIT, she turns away from him—and everyone else who thinks she applied to other back-up schools.

The pressures increase when an unpopular girl at school, Teri Litch, and her family—members of the church Kate’s father runs—move in with the Malones after their house burns down. Kate knows that Teri steals things from her—a watch, a necklace—but she is afraid to confront her and knows that her father won’t back her up, in part because he about the fate of Teri and her two-year-old brother, Mikey, who are on their own, since their mother is mentally unstable.

As Kate watches, she gets to know Teri better, and realizes she’s different than Kate realized. She is a talented carpenter, and is supervising the reconstruction of her house, and she is a devoted caretaker for Mikey. But just as Teri and the crew are beginning to make progress on the house, a horrible accident occurs that reveals a dark secret about Teri’s past and makes Katie see her in a different light, and changes her own perspective considerably and permanently.

Bardi, Abby. The Book of Fred. (Fiction) © 2000.
Told in four sections by four narrators, this is the story of how a family is affected when an outside joins them and creates stronger bonds between the members. Mary Fred, who has always lived in a strange religious commune that worships a mysterious man name Fred Brown and reads from the Book of Fred, is sent to live with Alice and her teenage daughter, Heather, after her parents are sent to jail for failing to seek medical treatment for Mary Fred’s two brothers, Freddie and Little Fred, who later died of their illnesses.

When she arrives, Mary Fred is shocked by some of the trappings of the outside world: television, provocative clothing, and the sort of lackadaisical way that Alice and Heather, and Alice’s grown brother, Roy (who lives with them) lead their lives-eating meals in front of the TV, barely speaking to one another, and basically failing to bond as a family. While she doesn’t purposely set out to change that, her ideas mix with theirs to establish new rituals and create a greater sense of family and warmth.

Alice, who is a warm-hearted librarian, has never fully recovered from her divorce from Heather’s father, who has since remarried and produced beautiful twin daughters with his new wife. Mary Fred’s presence gives her life new focus and helps her gain the confidence and sense of maternal accomplishment that she has failed to achieve with Heather, who spends her time talking back toher, watching TV, and skipping school.

Mary Fred’s effect on Heather is perhaps the greatest. Heather acknowledges that she thinks Mary Fred is a hopeless geek, with her French braids, her brown clothing, and her lack of knowledge about pop culture. But even Heather is drawn in by Mary Fred’s simple kindness and genuine inner beauty, and the two become fast friends.

Uncle Roy, Alice’s brother, lives a private, uneventful life. With no job, and no way to contribute anything meaningful to the household, he doesn’t even realize how deeply he’s been affected by Mary Fred until a horrible act of violence jeopardizes her life and makes him realize how he’s been wasting his.

This is a powerful and poignant novel about how people forge profound connections over the smallest things and how even families who have grown apart over the years can be knit together again through shared experiences and simple kindnesses.

Dudman, Martha Tod.  Augusta, Gone.  (Non-Fiction/Memoir). 2000.

If you’ve ever read Go Ask Alice, you’ll find Martha Tod Dudman’s memoir of her daughter’s troubled teenage years equally harrowing. A single parent, Dudman faced typical challenges: how to balance parenting and work, maintain reasonable control over her two children, provide them with love and attention.  Despite her best efforts, however, her daughter Augusta gets heavily involved in drugs. She steals, smokes, skips school, stays out all night, threatens her mother, and eventually, runs away from home.

Dudman is at a loss about how to help her daughter.  She tries, perhaps too desperately, to win Augusta’s love:  maybe her daughter is a free spirit who will thrive if she is more permissive; maybe she just needs to listen; maybe time with her father will help. None of it works. We watch as Dudman drives the streets of her small Maine town, searching for her daughter in the middle of the night, making desperate pleas to school authorities, begging her daughter to straighten her life up.  Nothing works.

Eventually, she and Augusta’s father agree to send their daughter to a wilderness camp for troubled teens, where they hope she will emerge from her reckless, defiant independence.  And it does work—sort of.  Besides the camp, her parents send her to an alternative high school. But even there, Augusta feels constricted and angry and ends up running away.

Augusta, Gone is a window into every parent’s worst nightmare:  a teen so incorrigible, so filled with anger and hate for herself and her life that she traps her parents in imprisons her family in her misery. Despite its bleakness, however, Dudman’s memoir is beautifully written and, in the end, offers some hope.

Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. © 2002 (Fiction)

I try not to say this too often because it lessens its impact, but Middlesex is one of the best books I have read this year.

The premise sounds lurid:  a teenage hermaphrodite discovers the truth about his/her body, falls in love with a member of the “same” sex, and launches an investigation into the truth about his/her family tree, only to discover long-hidden family secrets that are responsible for the rare malfunction that has left him/her without a physically distinct gender.

Far from sensationalistic, however, Eugenides’ book is a fascinating exploration of family ties and American history.  Calliope (now Cal) Stephanides, the protagonist, begins narrating the story of his self-discovery and his origins as an adult—years after his awakening and long after he has left his family of origin, his upbringing as a girl, and begun living his life as the man he is, at least chromosomally.

What follows our introduction to Cal—and his brief hints about his sexuality—is a full-scale saga that traces his ancestry to the remote Greek village from which his grandparents fled to prohibition-era Detroit, where we are offered a unique and personal glimpse into the world of bootlegging, speakeasies, race riots, and discrimination, a history that is as fascinating as Cal’s story of his own strange life.

 Chapter by chapter, we are offered glimpses into Cal’s current life before he dips back into the past, recreating his family’s story year-by-year, until finally his parents’ fate becomes his own.

This book will inevitably compared to last year’s hit, The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, and for good reason:  well-written, bold, funny, and intriguing, Middlesex is a big, chunky story about families and secrets that will grip you from the very beginning.

Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections.

This challenging novel will appeal to anyone who enjoys the longer, detailed novels of writers such as John Irving and Pat Conroy.  Franzen has created five novellas, really, that blend to form the story of the Lambert family.

Enid, the matriarch, is stuck at home in Kansas with her rapidly deteriorating husband, Alfred, who sense of reality and physical mobility are being drained by Parkinson’s Disease.  To alleviate her own sense of foreboding, Enid hopes to gather her children together for one last Christmas before Albert is inevitably shipped off to a nursing home.

Her three children are not interested in visiting for Christmas—they dread it in fact—in part because they are so wrapped up in their own concerns and in part because of each of them finds Enid and Alfred pathetic and intolerable for different reasons.

Chip, the middle son, has recently been fired from his job at a community college, where his relationship with a student left him bereft, and he’s recently been dumped by Julia, a book editor who read his unfinished manuscript and promptly left him. He gets involved in a shady business deal in Lithuania with Julia’s ex-husband, and it looks like he might not be able to make it home for the holidays.

Gary, the oldest son, is a wealthy businessman with three sons whose self-absorbed wife refuses to visit Alfred and Enid.  Forced to make a choice, Gary delays his decision as long as possible until he has to visit his parents alone or risk putting his marriage in jeopardy. Once there, however, he finds himself aggravated with his father for burdening Enid and annoyed with Enid for refusing to sell the house and move somewhere easier to take care of.

Denise, the youngest daughter, is an accomplished chef with a career-debilitating weakness:  she falls, over and over again for married men, putting job after job in jeopardy. Like her brothers, she dreads the visit to Kansas but manages to pull herself together to make the trip.

When the grown children get together with their parents, Enid hopes her dreams of a final family Christmas are fulfilled, but things don’t work out exactly as she hoped.

The story, with its details and commentary on modern societal problems, may not appeal to everyone, but for those who stick with it, the lives of the characters will absorb them and keep them thinking for days.

Goldberg, Myla. Bee Season.
Bee Season chronicles the Naumann family's experiences after fourth-grader Eliza discovers she is a spelling prodigy. Her father, Saul, who has longed for Eliza's older brother, Aaron, to discover the joys of Judaism and religion-related academe, has been disappointed by his son's disinterest in the subject, and seizes the opportunity to train his daughter in her newfound skill.

Saul's obsessions with Eliza and her talent and competitions overshadows his ability to see what is happening with the rest of his family:  his son embarks on a quest to find a religion that better suits him, and his wife is slipping away as an obsession of her own secretly begins to consume more of her time and sanity.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon has been one of the most-reviewed books this fall, which makes my endorsement a little redundant. But nevertheless, some of you may want to learn first-hand about a book from a Real Live Person who has actually read and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The story is narrated by fifteen-year-old autistic Christopher Boone, whose difficulties include not liking to be touched, being unable to tell a lie, and being repelled by the colors yellow and brown. Christopher discovers that his neighbor's dog has been brutally murdered, and is found hovered over the dead body and immediately accused of the crime. Questioning by police sets him free, however, and he begins a quest of his own to discover who the dog-murderer is.

His investigation leads him into some other information about his neighbors, including the fact that the owner of the dog has left town under mysterious circumstances and that his own father is suspiciously uncomfortable with Christopher's investigation. As he delves further into the lives of his neighbors and family members, Christopher becomes increasingly aware that people are not always as they seem, and that despite his own numerous problems, he may well be the best-adjusted person he knows.

Like most good novels, what makes The Curious Incident entertaining isn't the plot--although that definitiely moves along quickly--but the character. As unusual and challenging as Christopher can be, he is also a loveable, intelligent kid whose different way of seeing the world is perfectly captured by author Mark Haddon.

Anyone who has known, worked with, or wondered about autism and its effect on thinking will appreciate this intriguing new book.   

Malloy, Brian.  The Year of Ice.  

Kevin Doyle is struggling--particularly withhis attraction for a  straight classmate—amidst constant pressure to date girls and understand his complication family.

His mother, who died when her car plunged from a bridge into an icy river, left Kevin living alone with his father, Pat, a moody alcoholic who is continually pursued by single women in town. When Kevin’s aunt—his mother’s fiery Irish sister—informs his in a moment of anger that she believes his mother may have committed suicide, Kevin’s world becomes even more confusing. He is forced to confront the reality that his father was having an affair and planning to leave, and the possibility that his mother, in despair, may in fact have killed herself.

In the meantime, he is dating a girl in his class in order to hide his homosexuality, and her constant pressure for physicality strains his acting ability, but he knows he has to escape his small town before he can live freely as a gay man.  An encounter and friendship with an older man helps him accept himself as he is and wait out the time until he can leave.

When his father announces his intention to marry Carol, the woman he was planning to leave Kevin’s mother for, Kevin strikes out against Carol, but eventually forms an alliance with Carol’s niece, and the two try to make sense of their elders’ romance. 

This well-written, often funny, and frequently heartbreaking story will appeal to adult and teenage readers alike, and might be a good book group selection, as the characters’ choices and the complexity of emotions and relationships offers much to discuss.

 
Mackler, Carolyn.  The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round, Things. NEW 12/12/03.
 

The Usual Rules by Joyce Maynard. ©2003. (Fiction).

Wendy watches from her classroom window as two planes crash into the world trade center, and then returns home later that day to wait, with her four-year-old brother, Louie, and her stepfather, Josh, for her mother to return home from work.  Her mother worked at the World Trade Center, and as days pass following the terrorist attacks, it becomes increasingly clear that Wendy’s mother isn’t returning home.

Until now, Josh has been a sweet, stable mainstay in Wendy’s life. The musician married to her mother and the father of her beloved little brother, Josh has always been a calming influence in Wendy’s life. But the tragedy has unsettled him, and when Wendy’s semi-estranged and disorganized father arrives to reclaim his role in her life, Josh and Wendy are both unable to resist. Wendy is ready for a way to escape the MISSING posters around the city and the constant sense she has that people are uncomfortable around her, and so she goes with her father to his home in California.

At her father’s home, Wendy seeks solace in herself—she drops out of school and spends her days with a boy who is searching for his long lost brother, a teenage mother, and a bookshop owner, all of whom teach her something about dealing with challenges and handling losses.

The events of 9/11 serve as an appropriate backdrop for Wendy’s story, although any tragic loss might have precipitated her flight from home and her subsequent healing.  Despite its sad premise, The Usual Rules is less about loss than it is about healing, and Wendy’s resilience, and her ability to piece her life back together, will inspire readers.

McNeal, Laura and Tom.  Zipped.  © 2003. (Young Adult)

Mick Nichols has always admired—even had a secret crush on—his young stepmother, Nora, so when he discovers email evidence that she has been having an affair with a mysterious man named Alexander Selkirk, he is devastated—both for his father, and for himself.

Mick doesn’t immediately go to Nora or his father with his suspicions, choosing instead to look for more clues on his own and hopefully discover who Selkirk is.  In the meantime, he starts a new job as a landscape helper at a retirement community, part of a group of students from his high school working there, including Lisa Doyle, a girl he’s interested in.

Lisa and Mick become friends, but a romantic relationship is complicated by Lisa’s attraction for a Mormon missionary who is in town, and Mick’s growing friendship with Myra, a college girl, has him confused about which relationship to pursue.  The two, however, are united in their bond against their obnoxious supervisor, who mistreats them and is having a manipulative relationship with Lisa’s best friend Janice.

As the story progresses, Mick discovers more clues about the identity of Nora’s lover, and eventually figures out who the man is. In an uncharacteristic act of vandalism, he attempts to get even with the man, and eventually confronts Nora with his knowledge of what she’s done.

The plot of Zipped is multi-layered, threaded with intriguing subplots that only add to the depth of the characters and their dilemmas without creating confusion.  Mick is a likeable character, as are the other players—Lisa, Mick’s father, Lisa’s missionary friend, and even Nora, despite her failings.   Readers will appreciate the numerous sources of suspense, including Lisa’s pursuit of missionary Joe, the workplace problems, and the relationship between Mick and Myra. This is a thoughtful, well-designed story with a lot of teen appeal.

Mitchard, Jacquelyn.  A Theory of Relativity.

When Gordon McKenna’s sister, Georgia, and her husband, Ray, die in a car crash, he is certain he will be able to take on the responsibility of raising her one year old daughter, Keefer, as he and his parents believe Georgia would have wished. The in-laws, however—wealthy southerners—have other plans, however, and a legal battle for the right to raise the girl ensues.

The in-laws—Ray’s parents—show no mercy in their quest to raise their son’s daughter as their own.  They know that Gordon was adopted, and therefore not technically a “blood relative” of Georgia and Keefer’s, and they use this information in their custody battle, citing language in the law that refers to blood relations.

Readers who enjoy legal thrillers and family dramas will be pleased by this taut, emotional combination of the two genres.

Peters, Julie Anne. Luna.
Regan O’Neill is the keeper of her brother Liam’s carefully guarded secret. And it’s a biggie, as far as secrets go.  Since they were children, Liam has confided in Regan and revealed to her his private world, one that has given him his truest sense of self, but also the greatest torture.

Although the signs have been there for anyone willing to admit they saw them, only Regan knows for sure:  Liam has always known that despite his biological appearance, he is, in truth, a girl.  For as long as she can remember, Regan has been the sole witness to Liam’s experimentation with his female identity. At night, he dresses as his true self—that is, as a girl—and uses his female name, Luna, and appears only to Regan.

Liam faces increasing pressure from his father to behave in traditionally male ways: his dad wants him to try out for baseball, for example, and Liam turns to Regan for help in making the transition from male to female public. Regan agrees to help, but reluctantly, knowing that Luna won’t be welcomed by their school mates or their parents.

Luna is a unique and sensitive story about a rarely written-about topic, and a suspenseful account of a very complex and complicated issue. Many readers may be unfamiliar with the struggles—emotional, physical, and social—that transgendered teenagers must contend with. Few books for adults or teens tackle the issue, and Julie Anne Peters’ book is a welcome addition to the GLBTQ collection that addresses the topic carefully and smoothly.

Russo, Richard.  Empire Falls. ©2001. (Fiction)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

In this saga about small-town Maine life, a group of characters find their lives affected, and in some cases, manipulated, by the wealthy widow who owns much of the town.

Miles Roby, head chef and manager at the Empire Falls Grill, has long felt Francine Robideaux Whiting’s influence on his life.  As a boy, Miles’s mother, Grace, was employed by Mrs. Whiting, and became her housekeeper, her caretaker, and a surrogate mother to her crippled daughter, Cindy.  When Grace gets cancer, it is Mrs. Whiting who calls Miles and asks him to leave college and return home to care for his mother, which he does. But Miles never goes back to college, staying in Empire Falls instead to run Mrs. Whiting’s restaurant, marry, and raise a daughter.

Miles’s life begins to change when his wife, Janine, leaves him for the fitness club owner who helped her lose weight and change her self-image, and his teenage daughter, Tick, pulls away from Janine and becomes more involved in Miles’s life.

What makes Empire Falls a powerfully entertaining read, however, is not the plot, which is compelling and dramatic in a subtle, genuine way, but the characters, who are fully fleshed out and completely believable.  Besides Miles Roby, his wife, his daughter, and Mrs. Whiting, we are also treated to the spectacle of Miles’s drunken, irresponsible, but very amusing father, Max; Janine’s self-important, self-absorbed fiancé, Walt, and a myriad of other characters who make up Empire Falls and make the story believable and fascinating.

Readers who have enjoyed John Irving’s novels will find in Russo a similar sly sense of humor, as well as a gift for illuminating the seemingly minute details of individual lives and making them come alive and entertaining on the page. An excellent, absorbing read.

Shields, Carol. Unless. © 2003. (Fiction)

Unless, Carol Shields’ last novel before her death from breast cancer in 2003, is a book begging for a book group discussion.

Reta Winters, a forty-five-year-old writer, has spent her career translating works by other writers, most notably the multi-volume memoirs of a well-known French feminist. She’s also written a well-received “light” romantic novel, and is struggling with her editor over the sequel to that book.

Unless focuses on Reta’s desire to write a more literary novel, one that reflects her growth and her writing talent, despite her publisher’s interest in a best-seller of lesser literary value. Her life is complicated by the absence of her oldest daughter, Norah, who has dropped out of college and spends her days on a street corner in Toronto, where she sits silently with a sign around her neck that reads, simply, GOODNESS. This situation forms the core of the story, as Reta and her husband, along with their other two daughters, attempt to discover what's at the root of Norah's unusual behavior.

As Reta struggles with her writing, she and her husband also try to unravel the mystery of their daughter’s behavior, and determine what has happened to cause her to behave so strangely, and that suspense adds to the compelling nature of a softly-told, subtle story.

Shea, Lisa. Hula.

My younger brother and I never donned green grass skirts and practiced hula dancing in our living room when were growing up, but then, our mother was an elementary teacher who led third graders in practice sessions of the cursive alphabet, not a dance teacher who taught people how to wiggle their hips and bellies in the conga or the cha-cha (or the hula, for that matter).

David and I never lacked our share of adventures, however, and reading Hula by Lisa Shea reminded me of times when we turned out the living room lights and pretended the hairy green sofa was a lifeboat lost at sea as the flickering red and green Christmas lights reflected off the walls.

And unlike the unnamed narrator of Hula and her younger sister, our father (fortunately) never dressed up like a gorilla and drove off down Azalea Place at high spends gripping the steering wheels with hairy  rubber hands, although he did compose some repetitive car tunes such as “Stranded at the Mall” and “The Money Tree,” which he sang (off-key) in the car on every Sunday afternoon drive.

Hula is a rare piece of writing—one whose images and characterizations are incredibly specific and personal, and yet at the same time, evoked images of my own childhood even as I was totally immersed in Shea’s imaginary one. Readers will enjoy the humorous stories of growing up with a sibling that are shared in this book; though they are simple, they are powerful.

Tucker, Lisa. The Song Reader. © 2003. (Fiction)

Lee Ann’s older sister, Mary Beth, has a gift: by analyzing the songs people get stuck in their heads, she can tell what’s troubling them and help them solve their problems.  In addition to her waitressing, Mary Beth is able to use her song-reading talents to support herself, Lee Ann, and the small child a client left in her care, as the three make a life for themselves in the absence of Lee Ann and Mary Beth’s parents’ absences. 

When Mary Beth meets the charming Ben, Lee Ann is certain they will marry and the four of them will form an almost normal family.  But Ben leaves just when Lee Ann is sure he was about to propose, and Mary Beth won’t say anything about his departure. She slowly recovers from his departure, begins her song-reading again, and they live more or less normally for awhile.

But the family’s peace is disrupted again when Mary Beth’s song-reading reveals a long-kept secret the members of their small town would rather keep hidden, and the consequences of the revelation send Mary Beth spiraling into a depression. To help her, Lee Ann summons their long-lost father in hopes that his presence will bring Mary Beth out of her cloud, but his own precarious mental state makes him a questionable helper.

Readers—especially teenagers-- will appreciate Lee Ann’s honest voice, which is wise and sensible, and reveals her concern about her sister’s health and her desire to build a functional family.  Fans of 80’s music (or just those who remember it) will enjoy the many references to pop songs from the decade.

Weaver, Will.  Claws.  

Jed Berg thinks his life is flowing along pretty smoothly:  he’s number one on his school tennis team, he has a pretty, popular girlfriend, and his family life is good. His dad, a work-from-home architect, lets him drive his classic Chevy to school, and his mom, a successful lawyer, is pretty and smart.  So he isn’t ready when life shows its claws.

It starts with a note slipped inside his locker at school.  Someone who claims to be a friend of his girlfriend’s asks him to meet her at a local restaurant. Jed isn’t prepared for her—her attitude, her appearance, and especially not her message.

She says her name is “Gertrude.” She has pink hair and the clothes and demeanor of a goth. And she has a shocking message to deliver to Jed, one that will change his life.  “Your father is sleeping with my mother,” she tells him.

Jed doesn’t believe her at first, but “Gertrude” is adamant: their parents are having an affair, and she wants Jed to help her stop them. She sends him pictures that prove what she says is true, and they eventually begin emailing regularly. The more he reads her emails, the more Jed begins to suspect that “Gertrude” isn’t exactly the person she claims she is, and that she might not be telling him the whole story about herself—or about her parents.

So begins an incredibly suspenseful novel about a teenager facing a life-altering dilemma and a series of tough choices. Jed Berg is a likeable—if imperfect—character, and his story, especially his developing relationship with “Gertrude” and the suspenseful unfolding of the truth about their parents.

Readers will find a deeper meaning here, too, and a message about what we see on the surface and what lies underneath.  Jed’s journey—from confident and cocky and in control to shaken and unsure—might not be the happiest story you’ll read, but it will make you think. And you won’t forget it.