Description
Narrated from the perspective of ten-year-old Rainey Dougherty, an evocative novel chronicles the events of the summer of 1953, when his mother is sent to the sanatorium and Aunt Merle, along with her children Joan and Wayne, come to the Dougherty's Upstate New York home to help his father care for his five children. Reader's Guide included. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.
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"I was ten the summer we drove my mother crazy." And so starts this captivating debut novel, narrated by ten-year-old Rainey Dougherty. It's August 1953 in Four Corners, New York, when Rainey's mother is hospitalized for mental instability--or, as Rainey's father puts it, when the doctors say she needs a good long rest. Rainey and her four siblings find themselves at the mercy of Merle, their caustically funny and bitter aunt who comes up to the country from the Bronx--with her troubled fourteen-year-old daughter, Joan--to take care of that "goddamn bunch of nuts" she knows these children are. This starts a summer of enlightenment for Rainey when she learns about the realities of life through the eyes of innocence. And, though it seems strange at first, Merle's voice is the one clear note in Rainey's head as she begins a season without her mother, a season that brings both the young girls to the brink of disaster, again and again. For Rainey, it is a season that is often harrowing, sometimes hilarious, but always hopeful.
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