Rating: 
Summary: I didn't understand this...
Review: Maybe I am missing something, but I didn't think that this novel was anything special. It was readable, sort of. There were many open ends in the story of Daisy Mae and her visit to her cousin one summer. I still am baffled by the book and haven't a clue, for the first time in my life!
Rating: 
Summary: Evocative & Lyrical
Review: McDermott is wonderful at evoking time and place, as she does here with early-'60s Southhampton in the summertime. To me, this book is closer in tone to her early "That Night" (also a very good book) than to her more recent novels concerning more adult & Irish-American themes. Theresa is smart and likeable, and to me, her attraction to the 70-year-old artist is believable and hinted at early on, as she realizes that they both are involved with creating fictional worlds -- he with his brush and canvas, she with the fantasy tales which she regales her small charges with. The pall of loss and death are never absent, but it doesn't feel heavy-handed or trite. A leisurely summer book for readers who value attention to language and mood and aren't too lazy to pay attention themselves to the small moments, either in life or in novels.
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Summary: Coming of age in Long Island
Review: McDermott's latest novel Child of my Heart looks into one teen summer in Theresa's life. Theresa is fifteen here, beautiful (Liz Taylor looks) and has an easy way with kids and pets.Theresa's parents moved out to Long Island a long time ago to give their child the opportunity to move in the right circles: "They moved way out on Long Island because they knew rich people lived way out on Long Island, even if only for the summer months, and putting me in a place where I might be spotted by some of them was their equivalent of offering me every opportunity." Theresa handles her charges with amazing ease-fixing lunches, changing diapers, soothing egos with a practised caring hand. She takes daily walks to the beach with her cousin and assorted charges tagging along. Theresa's grace attracts the attentions of lonely men around her. She herself is keenly aware of her emerging sexuality: "my childish beauty was quickly becoming something a little thinner and sharper and certainly more complicated" she complains. Flora, one of Theresa's charges, has an artist dad who even at the age of seventy drinks like a fish and has an eye for pretty women. Theresa finds his attentions flattering and ultimately gives in to his charms. In some of the most beautiful scenes in the book, McDermott paints the relationship between Theresa and her cousin "Daisy Mae" with heart-breaking tenderness. Both girls are privy to a secret but letting the grownups know will only "spoil the summer." Instead, Daisy Mae and her precocious cousin spend some rare precious moments together. Daisy for one, knows it is never going to happen again. Running deep throughout the novel and serving almost to distract from (instead of add to) the story is the overwhelming presence of parental neglect. Almost all through the book, every child (and there are many of them) survives without parents. Even little toddler Flora is eternally perched outside waiting for her sitter with a bottle of punch cradled in her chubby palms. Her mom has walked out and her old father has no intentions of caring for her even if he knew how. This parental neglect cuts across all lines. Flora the child of a rich artist, is as much a victim of it as the Moran kids, Theresa's next door poorer neighbors. McDermott in her beautiful book makes us witness all the heartbreak and losses in crisp, precise prose. Her fifteen year old heroine is strong and wise both because of the pain and in spite of it.
Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable, but I won't write home about it
Review: My first thought while reading this book, which I picked up because it received excellent reviews in both Salon and the LA Times Book Review, was that maybe I was just not getting it. At first blush, the book tells a tale that is remarkably uneventful, and Theresa, the main character, is somewhat of a snot (charming with children, no doubt, but only sees the worst in most she meets). Another reviewer's comment about the unbelievability of some of the character's actions also had me nodding my head. A coming of age novel about a fifteen year-old girl who quotes Macbeth off-the-cuff and has more confidence than the much older rich folks she works for - she hardly seems like a naive little one to begin with. The characters believability breaks down particularly with her attraction to the 70-year-old artist. Still, it was an interesting device, and when I came here to review it, I found that I didn't have the heart to give it less than three stars. See, the book really grows on you. Some of the characters really are delightful, particularly Daisy, and some of the passages in the book really are masterfully crafted, beautifully and excellently written. Finally, there is a sentimental and woeful quality about the novel that is so subtle and nuanced that I barely noticed it until I was done with the book, and thought about it for a moment. Overall, I enjoyed it, although it's not without it's flaws, and it may take a bit to warm up to.
Rating:
Summary: Gentle, Nostalic and Lovely
Review: Perhaps this book found me at the right time. I'm a new mom and, apparently, my patience for fiction has diminished a great deal. While I used to read 4 or 5 novels a month, I've been limiting my recent diet to parenting books. Oh well. Somehow this story captured my attention. I think it was largely the gentle pace and the nostalgic portrayal of the summer days of girlhood. My only hesitation in praising the book involves the main character, Theresa. For the majority of the story she was painted in an angelic light. Her blossoming sexuality could certainly be understood, but her attraction to a senior artist--light and shadow notwithstanding--didn't quite mesh. In any event, I was drawn to Theresa's goodness. I suppose it was her precocious motherly qualities that endeared her to me at this time in my life.
Rating: 
Summary: No thank you.
Review: Reading time is precious. I always used to finish every book I started, but as I've gotten older, I've abandoned this policy. Now I quit 1/3 of the way through if I am not enjoying a book. This book found it's way into the DISCARD pile. I really did not like it. I found it dull.
Rating:
Summary: relaxing
Review: smoothly written, and a relaxing read, Alice McDermott must be a fragile and a sensitive person. an enjoyable book, easy read.
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Summary: Lyrical, memoir-like story
Review: The central character of Alice McDermott's "Child of My Heart" is sister to a string of girlhood heroines whose names are as familiar as those of old friends: Wendy Darling, Pollyanna, Heidi, Dorothy Gale, Polly Pepper, Jo March. Like them, McDermott's Theresa is the perfect babysitter, story-teller, and charmer. In this memoir-like novel she is captured in that glorious, golden moment when she is the heroine of her own life, and she knows it. Theresa is adored by children and pets, treasured by mothers, admired by fathers. She has no peers to intrude upon her kingdom and offer criticism or scorn. She is the solitary queen of her Long Island village in a summerland that is as hazy and nostalgic as a painting by Cassatt.
McDermott walks a fine line here, because Theresa's awareness of her youth and beauty, and of the power that they give her, could make her insufferable. To McDermott's credit, she manages to make us love Theresa as much as the children and animals do... perhaps almost as much as McDermott does. For despite her self-knowledge, Theresa is neither vain nor selfish, and she wields her power with love and a wisdom well beyond her years. This is the story of a single week in the month of June, when Theresa's eight year old cousin, Daisy, comes to visit from the sticky heat of a New York City summer. Poor Daisy is the middle child of eight, a little girl lost in a crowd of siblings. In an almost diary-like format, Theresa recounts the six long, summer days that she and Daisy spend together. In the course of this single week, nothing - and everything - happens. Life happens. Theresa, from the realm of childhood, observes with perceptive eyes the grown up world that she is about to enter - the world that the other children cannot yet see. No longer a child, not yet a women, she is both at once. She is wise woman and fairy godmother, not just to her cousin Daisy, but to the grown-ups as well. Like a modern Titania, she experiments with her own blossoming sexuality as if it were a pair of newly discovered fairy wings. What she cannot do, though, is change the fate of those in her charge. Try as she might, she cannot alter the courses of their lives.
In this elegantly simple book, McDermott portrays that glimmering, evanescent moment of girlhood, when an almost-woman perceives herself as bold, self confident, and powerful, before she is hobbled by the expectations, limitations and heartbreak of the grown-up world.
Rating:
Summary: Six stars
Review: The narrator is Theresa, and her story recounts events of a summer long ago when she was fifteen and her little cousin Daisy came to visit. Most of the action takes place among the mansions of Long Island, where Theresa with Daisy in tow walks dogs and babysits, trying with heart and soul to protect the innocents who fall to her care. Dogs love her. Children love her. Men love her, too: she's gorgeous. And what she's up against as she tries to defend her little kingdom includes adults, corruption, disappointment, and-we are told from early on-death. The characters include a famous seventy-year-old artist, who, like Theresa, wants to remake the world to his own liking; her dear but remote parents; a houseful of neglected children, including a little boy whose gifts go wrong in heartbreaking fashion; a great many wonderful dogs; and little Daisy herself, who when asked if she's afraid of heights replies "I'm only afraid of falling." We learn more about Theresa than she comes out and tells us. For one thing, while she wants to create a world like that of "Midsummer Night's Dream," she knows all along that her own is closer to "Macbeth." Certain imagines stick with you: an abandoned baby in a potato field, a toddler suspended underwater in the ocean, a tree covered with candy, a lonely girl lying in bed with tears running down into her ears, and three baby rabbits, like the children of this book, unformed and doomed. McDermott is brilliant about children and about the moment that ends a childhood. You won't find a writer who writes more brilliantly about love and caring, about beauty, or about loss. A gorgeous, shattering book: not just one of the best of the year, one of the best in the language.
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Summary: The Old Soul
Review: Theresa, the protagonist of "Child of My Heart" is an "Old Soul," one of those young people who have knowledge of life and of the world far beyond their years. In many cultures, Theresa would be considered a sage or a seer.
What she is though is a 15-year-old teen who naturally falls into the caring of other people's children. As she says: "Because I was a child myself when I began to take care of other children, I saw them from the start as only a part of my realm, and saw my ascendance as a simple matter of hierarchy---I was the oldest among them, and as such, I would naturally be worshipped and glorified. I really thought no more of it than that...I was Tatiana among her fairies." Theresa's journey through this novel involves mostly baby steps as she goes about her business of caring for the children and pets of the rich. She is a kind of Peter Pan: young enough for her young wards to relate to; but not too old for them to be afraid of.
Theresa's parents have big dreams for her as they have made sacrifices so that she can live among the wealthy of the Long Island seashore: "I suppose it was one of the ironies of their ambition for me, of their upbringing and their sense of themselves, that they would not see me as fully a part of that brighter world of wealthy people and supposed geniuses if I did not at some point recognize that they were not. That the best assurance they would have that I had indeed moved into a better stratum of society would be my scorn for the lesser one to which they belonged." It's ironic that these ideas still exist today for they call to mind the worlds of Edith Wharton and Henry James, over 100 years ago: that a young girl can change and should aspire to improve her social status by marrying money or genius or better, both.
One of the pleasures of this novel is McDermott's lucid and telling descriptions of Theresa's neighbors: "Mrs. Richardson was one of those blunt, loud, bangs-across-the-forehead women who seemed to believe that everyone else must surely be as pleased with her as she was with herself for being so no-nonsense and direct and, as she saw it, egalitarian." McDermott's prose is so rich with the experience of living that we almost immediately think of someone in our own lives that could be described in a like manner.
"Child of My Heart" is a gentle, beautifully written and persuasively aware book that's inhabited by characters and situations that calmly though persistently tug at the heartstrings. Though its heroine is a teenager, it is written from an adult's perspective in the mature and loving style of fondly recalled memory.
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