The story of how this casual invitation turns the two girls into what they call 'Summer sisters' is prefaced with a prologue in which Vix is asked by Caitlin to be her matron of honor. Caitlin, on the other hand, lives part of the year with her wealthy mother Phoebe, who’s just moved to Albuquerque, and summers with her father Lamb, equally affluent, on the Vineyard. Victoria, or more commonly Vix, lives in a small house her brother has muscular dystrophy her mother is unhappy, and money is scarce. In sixth grade, when Victoria Weaver is asked by new girl Caitlin Somers to spend the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard, her life changes forever. The years pass by at a fast and steamy clip in Blume’s latest adult novel (Wifey, not reviewed Smart Women, 1984) as two friends find loyalties and affections tested as they grow into young women. In the last chapter, the variously battered survivors reunite and dream once more: “They could make magical plays for a new generation of children.”Īmbitious, accomplished and intelligent in the author’s vintage manner. But Byatt has painted her large cast of characters so richly that we care about all of them even when their fates are summarized in a sentence. The pace, positively stately in the novel’s first half, speeds up and becomes unduly hasty in the final section. Only one son of this socialist set becomes a conscientious objector the others serve and most of them die. Her adult subjects, she writes, “saw, in a way that earlier generations had not, that children were people, with identities and desires and intelligences…But they saw this, so many of them, out of a desire of their own for perpetual childhood.” World War I forces everyone to grow up. Byatt’s concern is the vast area where utopian visions collide with human nature. Nesbit, but this is no mere roman à clef. The gothic sexual interconnections recall Bloomsbury, and Olive is clearly a gloss on E. Three of the children Olive is raising are not hers with Humphry in another household, magnificent works of art reveal repellent acts of incest. As the long, dense narrative unfolds, we see the dark side of these idealists’ lives. She takes in Philip Warren, a working-class boy who longs to make art, and connects him with Benedict Fludd, a master potter whose family belongs to the Wellwoods’ progressive, artistic circle. As the novel opens in 1895, Olive Wellwood seems the model New Woman: popular author of books that reinvent fairy tales for contemporary children, tolerant wife to Fabian Society stalwart Humphry, devoted mother pregnant with her seventh baby. The deeper subject, however, is the complex, not always benign bond that attaches children to adults. Byatt ( A Whistling Woman, 2002, etc.) encompasses the paradigm shift from Victorian to modern England in a sweeping tale of four families.

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt