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Four Corners
Diane Freund. Harvest Books: 2003 (paperback). ISBN: 0156026929. 256 pages.
Guide not available
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Sometimes, you can just feel a great novel coming on from the very first
sentence. Take this one, for example: "I was ten the summer that we drove my mother crazy." Oh, just admit it. You know you
want to know what the next sentence is. But we refuse to spoil the pleasure for you. The time is the early 1950s. The
setting is the small rural town of Four Corners. And the narrator, ten-year-old Rainey, is one of the most convincing and
compelling young voices ever to tell the story of the murky journey from childhood to adult awareness. Not that Rainey's is
your typical almost-adolescence. The middle child of five confused siblings all under the age of thirteen, Rainey isn't
sure why her mother is in a sanatorium. She can't ask her dad, because he's almost always at the bar. She doesn't have to
ask her aunt, because Merle rarely lets a moment go by without reminding the children who is to blame. Merle has left her
husband and son back in the Bronx, she tells the kids, "to come to this frigging sorry excuse for a Shangri-La because we
had finally succeeded in driving her sister crazy." Merle, by the way, is one of the best fictional characters ever to
slash and burn her way across a page. And what Merle can't teach Rainey about the harsh, greedy reality of human love, her
teenage daughter Joan certainly can. As frequently funny as it is dark and terrifying (you almost hate yourself for
laughing), Four Corners is that rare first novel--a flat-out, hands-down, must-read.
As seen on Ellen on Seven.
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