Review in Foreword Reviews

15 Feb

The Gift Child proceeds on the irony of directionlessness. In their search for Graham, Harriett’s family follows a variety of false leads buried in the opacity of police procedurals. That her narration is part of a memoir about the messiness of truth is undisguised; she acknowledges that it is an undifferentiated mass of lies, multiple truths, secrets, and memories warped by time. This purposelessness is wrought beautifully in Harriett’s profuse description of sea-blown settings: Pollock Passage is “a smattering of white wooden houses, a working-class Atlantis. Some dropped on the shoreline, some further inland.” 

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