Rating: 
Summary: A Small Miracle of a Book
Review: To read Alice McDermott is to enter a wonderland made up of familiar terrain but you still need a road map. With her clean, economical prose she cuts right through the arrogance of the wealthy and the submissiveness of the poor. Fifteen year old Theresa is unlike anyone I have ever encountered in fiction but have known in real life. Thoughtful, kind, and confident, she marches through Long Island, ministering to the neglected children of the rich. When her eight year old cousin Daisy comes to spend a few weeks with Theresa's family, Theresa recognizes how much in need of repair Daisy is. Physically but also emotionally, for Daisy is one of many children of a poor family and has been not abused so much as over looked. Theresa's own family seems to emotionally neglect her too, so caring for Daisy is, in a way, also caring for Theresa. They have a strong bond and Theresa creates a lovely summer for her. The thoughtless and careless ways of the rich are balanced by the thoughtless, careless, ways of the poor. Reading Child of My heart is like reading a primer in how to behave. Do yourself a favor and read this wonderful book. Thanks goodness for Alice McDermott!
Rating:
Summary: Magic!
Review: What's unique about this coming of age story isn't only the precision and beauty of the language, but a main character, Theresa, who is thoroughly enchanting.It's not every day you come across a teenage character with all the magic of Mary Poppins herself, whose ability to charm little children, small animals (and the little children's fathers) is so thoroughly believable. I was comfortably lost in a magical fictional world, a place where lollypops seem to grow on trees and magic shoes can change color. I was so sad when I came to the last page.
Rating:
Summary: Child of my Innocence
Review: With the knowledge that Alice McDermott had already won the NBA for "Charming Billy" it was my expectation that the this book would be good. I had not read her previous books, but nonetheless, no one wins the NBA and then writes trash after that, or at least, almost no one. I was not at all disappointed. While McDermott's plot line is a bit prosaic, the plot is not what is truly brilliant about this book. McDermott takes the plot, and allows it to unfold through the eyes of a pretty, intelligent and 16 year old girl way out at the end of Long Island. With a superb writing style, a truly wonderful sentence structure and an articulation that is simple but truly elegant, McDermott paints a vivid picture of a smart girl facing not so much the realities of life in coming of age, but much more, the Loss of Innocence. In virtually every way, McDermott's protagonist loses her innocence in a span of about 3 weeks. And yet, the book is subtly disguised as a sweet story about a young girl. Only when the reader scrapes below the surface of McDermott's truly elegant prose, does the reader fully appreciate the message that is being conveyed. It is with great praise, that I recommend this book to all readers of fine contemporary fiction. The book is truly worthy of being classified as current modern literature.
Rating: 
Summary: A disappointment
Review: Yet another author in need of an editor. This is mediocre at best, which is unfortunate. Her last book, Charming Billy, was quite good.
Rating: 
Summary: Inspired, Beautiful Prose;Some Reservations...
Review: You can read this book in one concentrated sitting, and the book feels like an inspired burst of breath. There are many passages of writing that are superb - some of the best sentence-writing McDermott has ever done... and that's saying something. Mcdermott's forte has always been rendering the specificities of life with a sober, but poetic slant. There is nothing really intriguing about the events themselves in McDermott's novels, but filtered through McDermott's eyes, everything becomes somehow meaningful... even sacrosanct. This book can be called a bildungsroman, but unlike most rite-of-passage books which tend to take a sweeping view of a person's life, this novel takes a slice from a girl's life (a single summer, a few weeks) and examines how such a short moment transformed everything in the world for her. The story is simplicity itself. Theresa is a fifteen year-old, a precocious babysitter, who looks after her young cousin, Daisy. On the surface level, not much goes on in the novel. There are adults who make up the moral landscape of the novel, and it's a tribute to McDermott's strength as a writer that much of this moral landscape is filled in through the absence of these adult characters... this vacuity that exists in the novel makes this suburban world of Theresa seem very lonely. The climax of the novel (which I won't give away) is quite foreseeable, but this doesn't distract us from being engaged. The ending is as natural and inevitable as life itself, and although unspoken, it is quite clear that Theresa will never be the girl of fifteen again hence. As I've mentioned, some of the writing is magnificent. The last fifty pages of the book achieve a kind of incandescence; I got one of those rare buzzes you only get from a special kind of writing. The prose alone can transport you. But at the same time, some nagging aspects of the novel got in the way of the story. It is clear that Theresa is fond of Daisy, but their relationship seemed too cloying at times. Undoubtedly, this is realistic; children can be attached to someone unequivocally. But it became repetitive... the constant 'poor daisy's' uttered, noxzema cream slathered on feet... This is a coming-of-age tale as only McDermott can write it. Most of the denouement of the novel, Theresa's coming to terms with life and its gravity, the passing of youth, becomes apparent through unspoken terms. Sure, this book doesn't quite fully plumb the depths of the characters as her excellent novels from the past. Nevertheless, McDermott's insight is enlightening, and the book contains some of her most effortlessly passionate writing to date.
Rating:
Summary: A lovely book about a young girl's coming of age
Review: Young Theresa is the middle class Irish and strikingly beautiful babysitter to the rich and famous of Long Island's East End. She spends her fifteenth summer caring for "four dogs, three cats, the Moran kids, Daisy, my eight-year-old- cousin, and Flora, the toddler child of a local artist." Theresa still lives in the world of children, weaving stories about lollipop trees and bedazzled shoes and spending her days at the beach. However, by the end of the summer, as illness, death and betrayal have obliquely asserted themselves, Theresa has become an adult. It is from this vantage of loss that our older narrator tells the dense story of one June to August. In one sense, little heartbreak happens. Early on, Theresa discovers the ominous bruises on her young cousin Daisy but decides not to search out their meaning. The neglected neighbor children, the Morans, crash through the summer but without great catastrophe. Even the privileged toddler, Flora, who has been essentially abandoned by her cosmopolitan mother, is still at an age where she can be easily pacified with a bottle of red juice. Tragedy and adulthood itself are postponed to the unwritten pages of life after the story's summer. However, in between, McDermott's lapidary prose hovers the inexorableness of Daisy's cancer death, of the Morans frustrated alcoholic future and of the lost and lonely adult Flora inevitably will become. "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day." Theresa quotes from her school's production of Macbeth throughout the novel and it is this ineluctable progression of time that forms the book's core sad note. For the narrator, an older Theresa looking back, childhood represents the finest point of life. It is a time of unlikely hopes, a time before the distasteful ambition, disappointed love and parental death of adulthood. Alice McDermott's skill and restraint make CHILD OF MY HEART an anxious, lovely book, rather than the mawkish or sentimental one its story would have produced under the care of a less exquisite, sincere and deliberate writer. Many readers will find the craft itself, rather than the characters or the images, to be the most memorable quality of this book. One reads with the rare confidence that no scene has been carelessly included, that no sentence is meaninglessly clever. Each paragraph further compels the reader towards McDermott's elaborate argument and desired impact. --- Reviewed by Rivka Galchen
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