Object Lessons

Ivy Books, 1992. Very Good. This first novel is an insightful family chronicle, an informed commentary on the '60s, and the coming-of-age depiction of a mother and daughter. As 1 3-year-old Maggie struggles with her identity within the boisterous Scanlan clan, her mother also finds her own place within the patriarchal family th at has never accepted her. Both women experience rites of passage during th e fateful summer that a housing development is being built behind their hom e, infringing on their emotional and physical spaces. A fast-paced plot inv olves small fires set in the development by Maggie's friends and romantic t ension between her mother and a man from her past. Readers will appreciate Maggie's dilemmas as she grapples with peer pressure and sexual bewildermen t, and as she begins to understand her mother, whose discontent oddly paral lels her own.