Review by New York Times Review
TO crudely paraphrase Tolstoy, all addicts' families are alike, and when it comes to teenage drug abusers they're unnervingly alike, right down to the last battering detail. So I was fewer than 30 pages into Anne Lamott's powerful and painfully honest novel when a chill of recognition shot through me. Rosie - 17, bright and sweet and anticipating the summer before her final year of high school - has come to realize how maddeningly easy it is to deceive her mother and stepfather, Elizabeth and James. So preoccupied are they with her alcoholic mother's faltering recovery that they forget to notice whether Rosie herself is drinking (she is). In fact, they're so clueless about her real life that when James picks a moment for an honest chat he has no idea Rosie is coming down off Ecstasy, so "tweaked" she has to struggle not to "grind her teeth into paste" as she listens. The mix of fury, disdain and (if you read between the lines) childish terror with which Rosie assesses these Pyrrhic victories will be painfully familiar to anyone who has endured his or her own child's outraged refutations. It also strikes at the heart of what "Imperfect Birds" is really about: the corrosive consequences of such endless deception. The parents are regularly and convincingly lied to, then later derided for having believed those very lies. "You had to feel sorry for Elizabeth," Rosie thinks, with something approaching real sympathy. "Getting tricked like that all the time, like a child." Rosie, Elizabeth and James (and their cat, whose small but realistic role made me smile) are a genuinely loving little family. You'd think they could battle through anything. Rosie's father is long dead, and her mother goes to A.A., but her wonderfully goofy stepfather, a novelist who also writes for National Public Radio, loves both Rosie and his wife. There is humor, comfort and warmth in this home. As the long summer stretches out ahead of her, Rosie, once a junior tennis prodigy and still a promising physics student, staves off boredom by giving tennis lessons to her attractive male physics teacher in return for pocket money. She also helps out at the local vacation Bible school. In between, though, she pops Valium, Quaaludes and Percocet; snorts cocaine; smokes marijuana laced with angel dust; steals James's and Elizabeth's sedatives; shares her friend's A.D.D. medicine; and swigs gallons of cough syrup. Maybe her parents should be more suspicious: one of Rosie's best friends has just come out of rehab, and drugs are a depressing fixture at the parking lot in town where the kids hang out. But, like so many parents everywhere, they try to maintain a balance, keeping a sharp eye on their increasingly angry and erratic daughter, endlessly dissecting and trying to understand her behavior while almost always giving her the benefit of the doubt. Unable to ignore the signs any longer, they buy over-the-counter drug-testing kits and demand samples of her urine. But she's ready for them, using drops of bleach to disguise the marijuana's THC. Meanwhile, suffering from an unrequited crush on her physics teacher, she finds solace (and sex) in the arms of a 22-year-old construction worker named Fenn. On the surface intelligent and sensitive (and, in a nice touch, approved by her mother), he's actually a serious drug user. And that's the tipping point. As the summer wanes, so too do her parents' hopes. It's now clear that Rosie needs some kind of intervention, and she needs it fast. Throughout this admirable novel, Lamott's observations are pitch perfect - likably, even brutally unsentimental, not just about parental hopes and anxieties but about the particular and touching fragility of simply being a teenager. I blushed at the description of the mother, seen through her daughter's eyes, who is "so intent on keeping everyone around her calm, so desperate for everyone to love and forgive her and be happy and trust her that sometimes she vibrated with it, like brass wires." And you ache with the truth of Elizabeth's visceral longing for her strong, beautiful, frightening daughter: her fear at what Rosie is becoming, mixed with - so honest, this - an irrational and perpetual hunger to please her. As this hunger threatens to damage Elizabeth's relationship with her husband, you sense James's righteous fury at what he sees as the "whole contemptuous lie machine of Rosie." If the novel has a fault, it's that it almost works too hard, insisting on doing a little too much of our thinking for us. Occasionally I craved a bit more space, the room to slow down and analyze things for myself, to sweat toward my own, perhaps more ambiguous, conclusions. If I didn't know Lamott was herself a recovering alcoholic, I think I would have guessed it. Just occasionally, all the supportive hugging and talk of higher powers made me want to pull back. BUT Lamott nearly always tempers her understandable evangelism with honesty and humor. Laughter redeems this book, and so does the fact that it's ultimately not just a novel about deception and drugs but about the great big bloody battle of love and sorrow that is parenthood. When James and Elizabeth discover that their daughter has been cheating them all along, with her urine tests and her lies, James moans that "the hits just keep on coming." I doubt there's a parent anywhere who wouldn't respond to that. The adults in Lamott's novel are endlessly lied to, then derided for believing those lies. Julie Myerson's latest book is "The Lost Child."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 18, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
It is sobering to think that Rosie Ferguson is your typical teenage girl. On one hand, she's in the throes of her senior year in high school: concerned with body image and boyfriends, BFFs and boredom, and, of course, the daily trauma of living with parents who are so hopelessly, well, hopeless. On the other hand, she is an adept addict who's never met a substance she wouldn't abuse or a male she wouldn't seduce. Juggling these two worlds demands bigger and more frequent scores, and more facile lies, while Rosie's parents, recovering alcoholic Elizabeth and workaholic stepfather James, are reluctant to enforce even the lamest disciplinary rules for fear of losing Rosie's love until one night when her world comes crashing down, and Elizabeth and James have no choice but to send Rosie to a wilderness rehab program. Reprising characters from her previous novels, Rosie (1997) and Crooked Little Heart (1998), Lamott intuitively taps into the teenage drug culture to create a vivid, unsettling portrait of a family in crisis. As she eschews the cunning one-liners and wry observations that had become her signature stock-in-trade, Lamott produces her most stylistically mature and thematically circumspect novel to date.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Rosie Ferguson, the young heroine of Lamott's Rosie and Crooked Little Heart, almost succumbs to the drug culture in this unsparing look at teenagers and parents who walk the tightrope between all-encompassing love and impotent fury. The former tennis star is now a straight-A high school senior, living with her mother, Elizabeth, and stepfather, James, in Marin County. Elizabeth, still susceptible to emotional breakdowns and fighting lapses into alcoholism, is acutely aware of Rosie's vulnerability, and she and James are vigilant in watching Rosie's behavior, knowing, as everyone does, that drug deals go down in the town's central square, and that the kids are drinking, sexually active, and aligned against their parents. Lamott captures this gestalt with her distinctive mixture of warmth, humor, and sensitivity to volatile emotional equilibrium, going laser-sharp into teen mindsets: the craving for secrecy and excitement, the thrill of flaunting the law and parental rules. Eventually forced to confront Rosie's peril and its potentially marriage-destroying power, Elizabeth and James take decisive action and risk their family. Straddling a line between heartwarming and heartbreaking, this novel is Lamott at her most witty, observant, and psychologically astute. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Lamott returns to some of her favorite characters in this exploration of raising a teenager in today's difficult world. In Rosie, Rosie was a child dealing with her mother's alcoholism. In Crooked Little Heart, she was a 13-year-old tennis champion beginning to understand boys, self-doubt, and the continued stress with her mother. In this novel, Rosie is now 17, and while she holds it together in school, her hidden life is all about drugs and alcohol. Since Rosie masks it so well, her mother, Elizabeth, now a recovered alcoholic, tries to give her room to experiment. But once the bottom falls out, Elizabeth realizes the consequences of her misplaced trust. Lamott covers faith and its part in life and personal struggles-a topic that's close to her heart and nicely portrayed through Elizabeth's best friend, the spiritual Rae. Verdict This is a deft, moving look at an extremely fragile and codependent mother-daughter relationship and how an out-of-control teenager affects a life, a friendship, and a marriage. Lamott is consistently wonderful with this type of novel, and once again she does not disappoint. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/09.]-Beth Gibbs, Davidson, NC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Lamott, best known for nonfiction, including popular books on writing (Bird by Bird, 1994) and spirituality (Traveling Mercies, 1999), returns to the novel with a sequel of sorts to one of her earliest and best, Rosie (1983). A child in that novel with an alcoholic mother, Rosie is now 17 and her mother, Elizabeth, is generally sober through Alcoholics Anonymous, though not without the occasional relapse. More beautiful than she knows, desperate to fit in and find love, Rosie insists to her mother, "I'm a good kid, Mom." But as a friend suggests, "Even the good kids break your heart." Rosie has yet to succumb to the addictions, pregnancies, suicide attempts and car crashes so common among the "good kids" in this California coastal community, but she has frequently been caught in lies and may even have trouble facing the truth about herself. She remains a source of tension between Elizabeth and James, Rosie's stepfather, who favors more of a tough-love approach than the unconditional love Elizabeth is more likely to bestow. Yet Rosie's deceptions threaten Elizabeth's sobriety, while the weakness of Rosie's mother and the death of her father have left Rosie with an emptiness to fill. Lamott alternates between the perspectives of Elizabeth and Rosie, and both ring true. As Elizabeth realizes, "Rosie had a secret life now, was putting together her own tribe, finding her identity there, and it was great to see, and it hurt like hell." If only the novel had been able to avoid proclamations such as, "Your whole selfish generation has helped kill this planet!" and facile reflections such as, "it's good to notice that my life is pretty great, even if my mind isn't." We're all imperfect birds, in a novel that sounds a warning note to parents of "good kids," even though some might resist its climactic remedy. In the end, the strengths of central characters and believable complications overcome a tendency toward oracular psychobabble. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
