Fifteen is a year of clarity; you're still one of the kids, but you're finally beginning to unlock the mysteries of adult behavior. In her luminous novel Child of My Heart, Alice McDermott's narrator is a 15-year-old girl who has two qualities that give her access to the secret lives of adults: she's beautiful, and she looks after their children. Her beauty has already shaped her life. Her parents have moved the family to the east end of Long Island in hopes of finding her a wealthy husband, or at least a fancy crowd to run with. Here she babysits the children of the rich, whose fathers demonstrate their relative decency by making passes at her, or not. The novel spans a dreamy summer as our heroine spends her days with her various charges at the beach, happily leading her crew on home-grown, rather sweet adventures. Among the kids she looks after is a toddler whose father is a famous, aging artist. The narrator's preternatural acuity is apparent in this exchange with a new client: "Mrs. Richardson learned by direct inquiry that I lived in that sweet cottage with the dahlias (interested) and went to the academy (more interested) and babysat for this child of the famous artist (most interested) down the road." Child of My Heart is a pretty straightforward coming-of-age novel, but it's marked throughout by this beautifully honed, wry, knowing tone. McDermott's narrator reminds us that our lost innocence might not have been so innocent after all. --Claire Dederer


From Publishers Weekly
There is something almost too good to be true about Theresa, the introspective and unusually perceptive narrator who recalls the summer of her 15th year in this engaging, taut novel by McDermott (Charming Billy). Theresa's Irish-American "well-read but undereducated" parents have little money but plenty of foresight; when they see that their only daughter will be beautiful, they move to East Hampton, Long Island, summer playground of New York City's richest, in the hopes that Theresa's beauty will eventually win her a wealthy husband. Because she has a way with children and animals, her parents have long encouraged her to baby-sit and pet-sit as a way to meet and impress the right people. This particular summer, her favorite cousin, eight-year-old Daisy, tags along as Theresa cares for dogs, cats, neighbor kids and a toddler named Flora, the only child of a 70-year-old womanizing artist and his fourth trophy wife. Entirely self-involved, the artist does manage to look away from his canvas and mistress long enough to notice Theresa, who finds his attentions exciting. Early on, Theresa discovers a tragic secret of Daisy's that she decides to keep to herself, which gives the summer and the book a wistful, melancholy air. As the girls corral their charges, Theresa offers half-innocent, half-ironic comments on the vanities and topsy-turvy family lives of her employers. This is another charmer from McDermott; it's evocative, gently funny and resonant with a sense of impending loss, as all stories of youthful summers must be. There's a whisper of maudlin sentimentality throughout, but Theresa is so likable, and her observations so acute, that one easily forgives it.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Theresa, 15, is poised to be a heartbreaker, but she is also the ultimate caregiver. In early childhood, she left Brooklyn with her blue-collar parents for the fashionable Hamptons on Long Island, and her obvious beauty was to be her ticket to a prosperous marriage and easy life. Seemingly oblivious to her potential, Theresa moves serenely through the summer, gathering small animals and children in need of love and comfort. Prime among them is her cousin Daisy, eight, the middle child in a large, mostly male Irish family from Queens, who is so compliant that she seems lost among her siblings. Theresa invites this child of her heart for what is to be a luxurious and indulgent summer by the sea but, immediately upon her arrival, realizes that Daisy is not well. While short on plot, this deceptively simple story about a few days in the early '60s carries an emotional impact that lingers after the novel is finished. Theresa's intuitively kind treatment of her charges is a model of nurturance, and her brief liaison with an elderly painter is a jarring indication of the unplanned path her life might take. The teen's character is fully formed, her clueless parents are likable, and the other inhabitants of the resort are well portrayed, too; the whole is a perfect jewel of exposition. Readers will respond to Theresa and be awed by her understanding of the adults around her.Susan H. Woodcock, Fairfax County Public Library, Chantilly, VACopyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Unfolding like the waves that roll onto the shore of the East End's beaches, this story about 15-year-old Theresa, the only child of understanding if somewhat absent parents, is threaded with foreboding. Theresa, who lives year 'round in East Hampton, narrates a summer she spends with younger cousin Daisy, who is visiting. Poised and mature, Theresa longs to comfort and care for children-to be surrounded by others so as not to be alone. Her days are spent working as a pet and babysitter for various residents, part-time or otherwise. Mostly, she watches the two-year-old daughter of a famous, 70-year-old painter, with Daisy of course in tow. The narrative soon takes on an ominous feel as mysterious bruises start to appear on Daisy's legs and passionate glances from the painter linger on Theresa a little too long. National Book Award winner McDermott's prose is even and elegant, and the complex character of Theresa offers subtle emotion imbued with haunting prescience. Though some of the details about being a local in the Hamptons are slightly off the mark, McDermott's true-to-life evocation of the lazy, sun-soaked summers in such a heaven (albeit a troubled heaven) outweighs this deficit. A nice addition to any literary collection.--Rachel Collins, "Library Journal" Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
This is a brave book matched by a brave performance. Even for a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist such as McDermott, it was risky to build her next book around the day-to-day ministrations of a 15-year-old Long Island babysitter. But McDermott's writing is so lyrical, her insights so powerful and affecting that you find yourself looking forward to spending more time with her protagonist, Theresa, just as her wards do. Theresa is remarkably competent and kind, far more so than the parents of the children she tends. She is also precisely on the bridge between her own childhood and adulthood. Sheryl Bernstein captures this quality perfectly, but even more astounding is how, by lightening her voice, she portrays the novel's children, rendering them tenderly but not sugary. M.O. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
One of McDermott's many gifts is her ability to portray adults, the poor clowns, as seen through a child's or teenager's clear-sky eyes, an illuminating and unsettling feat she performs with tender wit and quiet soulfulness in her exquisite fifth novel, the first since her National Book Award-winning Charming Billy (1998). McDermott has established early 1960s Long Island as a redolent fictional universe, "the kingdom by the sea" where ambitious working-class Irish Catholic escapees from Brooklyn keep an assessing watch over the island's elite. Fifteen-year-old Theresa's parents moved there to increase the odds that their exceptional daughter will attract a well-off husband. Meanwhile, this princess-in-waiting, who is every bit as shrewd as she is lovely, keeps herself busy during this eventful summer, her season of passage from girl to woman, by caring for her self-centered neighbors' woefully neglected pets and children. Her sweet little city cousin, Daisy, a poetically minded stoic with unruly red hair and one of fiction's most captivating girl spirits, is visiting, and the two share a magical world in which lollipops grow on trees and pretty plastic shoes have cosmic powers. But Theresa soon realizes that Daisy is ill, and the cousins' intuitive complicity in concealing her condition infuses this magical novel with a profound poignancy. Resilient toddler Flora is Theresa's primary babysitting responsibility, and of all the men who circle Theresa, aroused by and wary of her dawning sexuality and self-possession, Flora's father, a famous abstract painter and still a hard-drinking womanizer at age 70, is the one this resourceful and pragmatic young woman is drawn to. Just as the calm and sparkling sea can conceal a tricky undertow, McDermott's gorgeous novel is laced with sly literary allusions and provocative insights into the enigma of sexual desire, the mutability of art, death's haunting presence, our need for fantasies, and the endless struggle to keep love pure. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"She is a writer in a league of her own." - Jill Smolowe, People

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"The beautiful child of older parents, raised on the eastern end of Long Island among the summer houses of the rich, Theresa is the town's most sought-after babysitter - cheerful, poised, an effortless storyteller, a wonder with children and animals - but also a solitary soul already attuned to the paradoxes and compromises of adult life. Among her charges this fateful summer is Daisy, her younger cousin, who has left a crowded working-class household in the city to spend a few quiet weeks in this bucolic place, under Theresa's benevolent eye." While Theresa copes with the challenge presented by the neighborhood's waiflike children, the tumultuous households of her employers, the mysteriously compelling attentions of an aging painter, and Daisy's fragility of body and spirit, her precocious, tongue-in-cheek sense of order is put to the test as she makes the perilous crossing into adulthood.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times Book Review

There is...something Jamesian about McDermott's style: this novel's craftsmanship and its moral intelligence are as one.

Book Magazine

In the seductive, sumptuous world of Alice McDermott's fiction, life is always subdued by loss, love is always inseparable from ache and compassion is always the incomparable salvation, the counterweight to both circumstance and fate. In books like That Night , At Weddings and Wakes and Charming Billy , which won the National Book Award in 1998, McDermott created characters so real and so complex that one could hear them, see them and know them. With Child of My Heart , the author's fifth novel, McDermott introduces a cast of preternaturally precocious children who move about a seaside town with the sort of tenderness and disquieting foreknowledge that is denied to most preoccupied adults. Child of My Heart is startlingly touching, limned with both glimmer and shadow, sweetness and despair, premonition and memory. Its nostalgia is of the Irish variety, in which beauty and heartbreak are kept apart by very slender lines.

At first, this appears to be McDermott's simplest book. The core of the story plays out over the course of just a few days, for one thing, and the events are relayed in neat, nearly chronological order, for another. And yet so much happens to so many hearts, so much is revealed and then forsaken, and so much is finally placed at stake that this may well be McDermott's finest achievement. The novel's protagonist and narrator is a blue-eyed, black-haired beauty named Theresa￯﾿ﾽthe only child of older, undereducated parents whose move to Long Island years before was precipitated by their desire to place their daughter in close proximity to wealth and status. By the time Theresa is ten, Theresa's mother is encouraging her to answer all thehelpmate ads. By the following summer, she is the most sought-after caretaker on the eastern tip of Long Island￯﾿ﾽloved by little girls and boys, by dogs and cats and rabbits.

When the book opens, Theresa is fifteen. Her eight-year-old cousin, whom she dubs Daisy Mae, has come to Long Island for an extended visit, and together the two administer to a growing entourage of animals and neighbors, not to mention the toddler daughter of an inscrutable and possibly famous local artist. They move from house to house, taking dogs out for walks, rescuing a dirty baby from her brothers' abandonment, saving the toddler Flora from the inconceivable neglect of her recently departed mother and her old (but still sexy) painter-father.

Theresa, of course, is the one in charge, but Daisy Mae, the shy and seemingly tentative child of an overcrowded household, soon reveals her own enormous capacity for improving the lives of others. They are a stunning duo, Theresa and Daisy Mae, and McDermott spins their story with aplomb, revealing them to the reader as they reveal themselves to each other. Theresa is never anything short of loving or imaginative. Daisy Mae is nothing less than the perfect recipient for Theresa's love. They grow sweetly conspiratorial in the stories they tell, in the games they make up, in the kindness they dollop onto others. They grow closer than most sisters ever do.

But there is something dark beneath this surface. There is something neither girl is saying. There is, for example, the unwanted, perhaps even dangerous, attention shown to them by lonely men. There is the chaos of the neighbors next door, so many filthy children, so much parental neglect. But most of all, Daisy Mae is not well, and this is no temporary sickness. There are bruises on her feet, on her back, on her arms. There is a fever in her skin. She is pale and anemic and she tires easily, and none of the adults are paying much attention. Theresa knows that it is up to her to tell the truth about her cousin's blooming bruises. Yet she is wise enough to recognize that if she tells an adult what she has seen, she will rob her cousin of the summer.

So Theresa finds a way to feed Daisy Mae St. Joseph's aspirins instead. She gets more liver and spinach into her cousin's diet. She takes her to the beach and begins what she calls a "peculiar therapy," hoping it will cure the bright blue feet: "I had Daisy stand at the shoreline," Theresa says, "where the waves could swirl around her feet, but not so far in that they could upset her balance. I told her to stand in one place while the water rushed around her ankles and her feet sank into the sand, and then, when the wave went out again, to pull her feet out, move a bit to the left or the right, and then let them sink in again." The love Theresa has for Daisy Mae is huge and overwhelming, but it is the way that Daisy Mae reciprocates that is most touching of all. Love this big can never survive, and McDermott is keen to that. What she gives us here is the dream and its denial, a novel that hurts as much as it heals, and that has all the weight and beauty of a classic.

It is all too beautiful, especially because McDermott, writing with her famous subtlety and style, makes us understand that the girls' innocence might be coming to its end. Child of My Heart is a book of astonishing craft and enormous heart. Line after line evokes and pricks. Truth after truth gets spoken. ￯﾿ﾽBeth Kephart

Book Magazine - Beth Kephart

In the seductive, sumptuous world of Alice McDermott's fiction, life is always subdued by loss, love is always inseparable from ache and compassion is always the incomparable salvation, the counterweight to both circumstance and fate. In books like That Night, At Weddings and Wakes and Charming Billy, which won the National Book Award in 1998, McDermott created characters so real and so complex that one could hear them, see them and know them. With Child of My Heart, the author's fifth novel, McDermott introduces a cast of preternaturally precocious children who move about a seaside town with the sort of tenderness and disquieting foreknowledge that is denied to most preoccupied adults. Child of My Heart is startlingly touching, limned with both glimmer and shadow, sweetness and despair, premonition and memory. Its nostalgia is of the Irish variety, in which beauty and heartbreak are kept apart by very slender lines. At first, this appears to be McDermott's simplest book. The core of the story plays out over the course of just a few days, for one thing, and the events are relayed in neat, nearly chronological order, for another. And yet so much happens to so many hearts, so much is revealed and then forsaken, and so much is finally placed at stake that this may well be McDermott's finest achievement. The novel's protagonist and narrator is a blue-eyed, black-haired beauty named Theresa—the only child of older, undereducated parents whose move to Long Island years before was precipitated by their desire to place their daughter in close proximity to wealth and status. By the time Theresa is ten, Theresa's mother is encouraging her to answer all the helpmate ads. By thefollowing summer, she is the most sought-after caretaker on the eastern tip of Long Island—loved by little girls and boys, by dogs and cats and rabbits. When the book opens, Theresa is fifteen. Her eight-year-old cousin, whom she dubs Daisy Mae, has come to Long Island for an extended visit, and together the two administer to a growing entourage of animals and neighbors, not to mention the toddler daughter of an inscrutable and possibly famous local artist. They move from house to house, taking dogs out for walks, rescuing a dirty baby from her brothers' abandonment, saving the toddler Flora from the inconceivable neglect of her recently departed mother and her old (but still sexy) painter-father. Theresa, of course, is the one in charge, but Daisy Mae, the shy and seemingly tentative child of an overcrowded household, soon reveals her own enormous capacity for improving the lives of others. They are a stunning duo, Theresa and Daisy Mae, and McDermott spins their story with aplomb, revealing them to the reader as they reveal themselves to each other. Theresa is never anything short of loving or imaginative. Daisy Mae is nothing less than the perfect recipient for Theresa's love. They grow sweetly conspiratorial in the stories they tell, in the games they make up, in the kindness they dollop onto others. They grow closer than most sisters ever do. But there is something dark beneath this surface. There is something neither girl is saying. There is, for example, the unwanted, perhaps even dangerous, attention shown to them by lonely men. There is the chaos of the neighbors next door, so many filthy children, so much parental neglect. But most of all, Daisy Mae is not well, and this is no temporary sickness. There are bruises on her feet, on her back, on her arms. There is a fever in her skin. She is pale and anemic and she tires easily, and none of the adults are paying much attention. Theresa knows that it is up to her to tell the truth about her cousin's blooming bruises. Yet she is wise enough to recognize that if she tells an adult what she has seen, she will rob her cousin of the summer. So Theresa finds a way to feed Daisy Mae St. Joseph's aspirins instead. She gets more liver and spinach into her cousin's diet. She takes her to the beach and begins what she calls a "peculiar therapy," hoping it will cure the bright blue feet: "I had Daisy stand at the shoreline," Theresa says, "where the waves could swirl around her feet, but not so far in that they could upset her balance. I told her to stand in one place while the water rushed around her ankles and her feet sank into the sand, and then, when the wave went out again, to pull her feet out, move a bit to the left or the right, and then let them sink in again." The love Theresa has for Daisy Mae is huge and overwhelming, but it is the way that Daisy Mae reciprocates that is most touching of all. Love this big can never survive, and McDermott is keen to that. What she gives us here is the dream and its denial, a novel that hurts as much as it heals, and that has all the weight and beauty of a classic. It is all too beautiful, especially because McDermott, writing with her famous subtlety and style, makes us understand that the girls' innocence might be coming to its end. Child of My Heart is a book of astonishing craft and enormous heart. Line after line evokes and pricks. Truth after truth gets spoken.

Publishers Weekly

There is something almost too good to be true about Theresa, the introspective and unusually perceptive narrator who recalls the summer of her 15th year in this engaging, taut novel by McDermott (Charming Billy). Theresa's Irish-American "well-read but undereducated" parents have little money but plenty of foresight; when they see that their only daughter will be beautiful, they move to East Hampton, Long Island, summer playground of New York City's richest, in the hopes that Theresa's beauty will eventually win her a wealthy husband. Because she has a way with children and animals, her parents have long encouraged her to baby-sit and pet-sit as a way to meet and impress the right people. This particular summer, her favorite cousin, eight-year-old Daisy, tags along as Theresa cares for dogs, cats, neighbor kids and a toddler named Flora, the only child of a 70-year-old womanizing artist and his fourth trophy wife. Entirely self-involved, the artist does manage to look away from his canvas and mistress long enough to notice Theresa, who finds his attentions exciting. Early on, Theresa discovers a tragic secret of Daisy's that she decides to keep to herself, which gives the summer and the book a wistful, melancholy air. As the girls corral their charges, Theresa offers half-innocent, half-ironic comments on the vanities and topsy-turvy family lives of her employers. This is another charmer from McDermott; it's evocative, gently funny and resonant with a sense of impending loss, as all stories of youthful summers must be. There's a whisper of maudlin sentimentality throughout, but Theresa is so likable, and her observations so acute, that one easily forgives it. (Nov. 25) Forecast: A tartly luscious lollipop-studded jacket makes this an enticing option for readers craving a taste of summer. McDermott fans will be thoroughly satisfied. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal