Review by Library Journal Review
Anna Dunlap, newly divorced, is shaping a life centered around her three-year-old daughter, Molly. Then Leo Cutter sparks a sexual responsiveness new to Annaherself the product of a circumspect New England family, frigid during her marriage to a man of similar temperament. Molly and Leo like each other, too, and Anna sees them as a loving family unituntil her ex-husband sues for custody, citing sexual activities that put his child at risk. The love affair is irrevocably changed, as Anna opens her life to a court-appointed psychiatrist and bends the truth to her lawyer's strategy. Anna's first-person narrative, with its skillfully interwoven flashbacks, creates foreboding as it builds to the drama of the hearing and its wrenching conclusion. Miller's first novel is a stunner: so emotionally true and cleanly written, its characters so wonderfully and fallibly human, its issues so painful. Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., Va. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
What makes a mother unfit to raise her own child? That's the surface issue in this often engrossing first novel. Accessibly and attractively told in an easy confessional style, Miller's very current conundrum examines the baggage of guilt one can carry into sex and motherhood. Anna Dunlap, who narrates, is a conscientious divorcee feeling her way toward an independent new life for herself and three-year-old Molly. The scene is Boston, where Anna is just settling in--piano pupils, part-time laboratory job, day-care for Molly--when she becomes involved with Leo Cutter, a loose-hanging artist who lives in a loft and doesn't own a suit. Experiencing sexual fulfillment for the first time, Anna's commitment to life with Leo is total (at his insistence she has an abortion). And she sees no obstacle to bringing Leo into her life with Molly--a home life that includes casual nudity, showers together and Molly's occasional hops into bed with Mom. . .and Leo, who seems to be getting all of mother's attention. Then, Anna's former husband, remarried and properly middle-class, learns from Molly that she has physical contact with Leo that seems to go beyond permissible boundaries. The case goes to court, and Anna sees her life picked apart by others. Throughout, Anna remembers some early family relationships, underlining repression and distance, and her failure to achieve distinction as a pianist--a failure that propelled her into adolescent sex and its ""Nauseous sense of falseness in myself."" With Leo, there's a ""boundless Eden."" But after the custody battle, Anna drives Leo away with ""an irrational hatred,"" and--embarked on a tentative and solitary life--she will, for moments of pleasure, return to the piano: ""Other instruments require a kind of connection and exposure I am incapable of."" A Kramer vs. Kramer custody fight; a most convincing tot; and an appealing confidential style that points up some matters of current controversy (what are the legal and societal boundaries of child abuse?): a potential winner. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
