Maude McDaniel

Growing up is what Kitty does in Playing with the Grown-ups, but as usual the process isn't always pretty. Oh, in the beginning this story is quirky and thoughtful, just what one would expect from the pen of a granddaughter of Roald Dahl, beloved author of startling children's books. What's more, it's funny and moving, and worth devouring on its own as an Eccentric-Mother-Knows-Best kind of tale.

But this is no children's story. Read far enough, and the pages darken with a kind of coming of age that is only slightly more palatable than, say, Augusten Burroughs' in Running With Scissors. Model, actress and now novelist Sophie Dahl is taking a page from her own adolesence, and Kitty's mother, Marina, turns out to be something of a Lost Girl in a parody of Peter Pan, "a beauty and a painter and a weeper . . . who lived with alacrity," who wrung all she could out of the world she lived in, but yearned for another one that never existed.

Mother of three children by two different men, she leaves the raising of them to Nora, a kind of meta-mother nanny whose faithfulness is implicit throughout the story. Without Nora, Marina would never have had the time to be so reckless herself – a lovely, delightful, toxic forever-child, who sometimes tries to stay on track, but is too often swept beneath the engine of her own and others' weaknesses. Quarreling with her parents, painting artistic pictures (though not selling enough of them), converting to the beautiful sentiments of a New Age guru, falling in love with slightly sleazy men, Marina takes over Dahl's pages, heartwarming at first, then growing into a deeply troubled victim of the pot-and-coke culture and her own fecklessness.

For Kitty, who learns only gradually that her adorable mother is also pitiable, growing up skirts the edge of disaster. Just in time she moves beyond the negotiable hell of boarding schools, dangerous friends and questionable heroes to reach a haven of adult awareness and a mature idea of her mother's tragedy. Playing With the Grown-ups grows beyond charming child's play to a clear-eyed compassion for the world's limitless store of tragic human comedy.

From the start he had too much to do: breathing, sleeping, waking, eating . . . they just went on and on. For someone already wounded when he goes into the Royal Air Force, Alfred Day has no reason to hope that things will get better for him as a tail gunner in a bomber with 27 trips scheduled over Germany and they don't.

Looking back on his time in the service five years later, as an extra on a film that is set during the war, Alfie finds a certain relief reliving times and behavior that had slipped into an undifferentiated past, and, finally, arrives at some form of healing. It isn't easy, either for him or the reader, but Day, A.L. Kennedy's knockout account of the process, is even more rewarding than it is challenging.

The challenge lies in her elliptical writing style, which bends Alfie's history into at least seven different planes that often flow into each other almost indistinguishably. Yet, remarkably, the reader, following blindly, never puzzles for long over context. Whether Alfred is growing up; bombing Germany; meeting his dear love Joyce; committing the most grievous crime of his life; enduring his time as a German POW; remembering it all; or, in his most recent time frame, rebuilding his life, you're there with him, established in time and place because of Kennedy's extraordinary skill.

The Scottish writer has not received the attention she deserves on this side of the Atlantic, although her three collections of short stories, five novels and two works of nonfiction, not to mention numerous prizes, would seem to demand it. Day may make the difference with its eloquent insight into the emotions of hard-bitten soldiers, and the hum of humor that underlies all but the most wrenching events.

Unforgettably, Kennedy tells her story of damaged men, damaged women and damaged lands. In the end she gives us the best that can be expected, a rueful close that shows Alfred and Joyce just like happy people.

Maude McDaniel writes from Maryland.

John and Mary Keane are ordinary people, too ordinary perhaps by today’s standards: quiet, steady, dependable. They grew up during the Depression and World War II, and when these were over and done, they met and married and managed to get along with each other, sometimes better than others, and had four children who lived different lives entirely.

This is the kind of plotline that would challenge most authors beyond their capabilities, accustomed as they are these days to more exciting literary forays. However, like Anne Tyler, Alice McDermott knows what she’s doing: Her five previous novels, dealing with similar ordinary people and situations, have earned her critical kudos and a fistful of honors and tributes. Out of the rich soil of that old critics’ cliché, the human condition, McDermott raises uncommon, and uncommonly beautiful, plants.

John and Mary are not so much individuals as middle-class, Irish Catholic archetypes (referred to mostly in terms of their relationships to others), but their children are allotted personalities of their own. Life on Long Island, the Vietnam War, cultural upheaval, the sexual revolution all play their part in the individualization of the two sons and two daughters of whom we take leave far too early. The characters learn that life goes fast: one moment nudges the other out of the way. And, in the end, you could not have [the future] without the [loss of the past].”

With McDermott, there is always more than meets the eye. One delicately drawn scene of the family at the beach shadows all the dreams and fears of the future in the present play of relationships. Then there is the most faithful (eight pages but still engaging!) replay I’ve ever read of standing in line (at the World’s Fair), and the occasional reference to a neighborhood pianist, which culminates in a final point: To live life honorably and fully is a gift which blesses you and those around you.

Maude McDaniel writes from Maryland.

When Catriona's eight-year-old daughter Daisy shows flu symptoms that won't go away, the London doctors, stymied, start looking for the answer in Cat's own intentions. Hysteria? Munchausen's Syndrome, where mothers actually make their children sick to magnify their own importance? After all, Cat's "not like other mothers, with their anoraks and certainty." All too soon, the normal paradoxes of life ("they hurt because they were getting better") sound like sick ironies instead of wry realities. For someone like Cat, who has tried to ignore her own mother's early neglect and rejection, the idea that she would harm her daughter is especially harrowing. Change that to catastrophic when Cat's husband begins to share the doctor's fears.

When postcards start arriving from her mother, who has cobbled together a new life in Germany, Cat is driven to hide them, along with her memories of a childhood spent under the control of sadistic or careless social workers. Only when events begin to lurch out of control does she begin to make contact with the past she hoped she could hide under her perfect wife and mother disguise.

English author Margaret Leroy has written several nonfiction books, and two earlier novels. Her London setting is colorfully authentic, with its own surprises, like the suburban foxes that form a recurrent motif of subtle threat to comfortable lifestyles. She certainly does not make the argument that when you are sick your child will also get sick, and when you heal, your child will immediately get better. But at the very least, facing one's problems head-on may reveal helpful clues to a viable recovery for both mother and child, and that's how it works in this singular, graceful novel.

Maude McDaniel writes from Maryland.

Milly was 16 when Cousin Bettie came to visit, and things were never the same again. This might have been expected, since the whole family ricocheted off one another unpredictably, even before Bettie arrived. Still, the uneasy balance, however temporary, maintained by Milly’s weak father, Joseph, her difficult mother, Margaret, and her obsessively contrary younger sister, Twiss, receives a huge blow when Bettie enters the picture.

Or at least, so it seems on one particular day, when Millie, as an old woman, impulsively shares some existential doubts with visitors who don’t know her. Beginning and ending on that day, The Bird Sisters erratically reviews the lives of the sisters through the last half-century, as they create the world they now live in, for better or worse, where caring for injured birds is preferable to facing the broken shards of their past lives and the relationships that could have been.

On the whole, personalities rather than events control the action here. Milly, who always tries to do the right thing, is torn apart by the conflicting circumstances that being well-meaning creates. Twiss, who is indeed slightly twisted, salts wounds that might have healed in a less afflicted family. And Bettie? She is the troubled spirit who, with Joseph’s assistance, spins the family’s fate out of its dogged course into a future no one really wants.

This is one eccentric family, if eccentricity could ever be defined as a commonly shared characteristic. Sensitively written, and sometimes subliminally amusing, Rebecca Rasmussen’s debut novel will keep readers’ eyes open well into the night.