Volume 50, Number 1 · January 16, 2003
'Castle of the Imagination'
By Margaret Atwood
Child of My Heart
by Alice McDermott
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 242 pp., $23.00
Child of My Heart is Alice McDermott's fifth work of fiction. The fourth, Charming Billy, won the National Book Award, and was a best seller, as was At Weddings and Wakes. Both of these novels explore, subtly but ruthlessly, the same complex world—that of second- and third-generation emigrant Irish, living angry, ruined, melancholy, occasionally hopeful lives in and around Brooklyn and Queens, mainly in the Fifties and early Sixties, with summer vacations spent on Long Island. Both show the stories made from events as being coexistent with, different from, and frequently more important than the events themselves.
Review, 3074 words
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