Customer Rating:  
Summary: Poignant
Comment: This is the type of saccharine story-line that I'd ordinarly hate. But there's something about this one, an innocence and sweetness that just won me over despite my jaded outlook. Alice McDermott creates a perfectly believable 15 year old, and despite a few "what in the worlds" along the way, it was easy to fall in love with an innocent 15 yr old's view of the world. It's one of those small stories where the whole is absolutely greater than the sum of its parts.
Highly recommended.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Too Good To Be True
Comment: I thought it was well written, but I was frustrated at the perfection of the main character Teresa, who took excellant care of everyone in the world at age 15. In fact, all children preferred her to their own parents. She also was care giver for her little cousin, but seemed unmoved when her cousin got sick and died. The whole dying thing was glossed over even though the book constantly built up to the impending health crisis of "poor Daisy".
Customer Rating:
Summary: Baby sitter par excellence
Comment: This is a great novel for readers who are strong believers in children making their own entertainment. The 15 year old protagonist is the baby sitter par excellence, and it is a pleasure reading how she relates to younger children: resourceful, empathetic, but not overly sentimental. Her take on the adults around her is very much that of a 15 year old, and perhaps that is the reason she does not seem to relate very well to her own parents. Also, while I understand Theresa's motivations in concealing Daisy's illness, it still bothers me.
McDermott introduces plot elements to make the novel more interesting, but it is slow reading at times.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Incredibly Moving
Comment: This powerful and very moving novel centers on Theresa, a 15-year-old beauty on the cusp of adulthood who spends one almost imaginary summer hovering between the worlds of childhood and the world to come.
An only child raised by loving devout Catholics, Theresa has become the superstar babysitter/pet sitter in the quiet Long Island town where her naive parents have moved in order to put her in the "correct society" so that she can eventually marry well. Because of her beauty, and because of her very real connection to children and animals, Theresa is a major hit among the summer-dwellers, none of whom has a clue what their children are doing or thinking. Indeed, their benign (and sometimes not so benign) neglect of their offspring is a major theme in the novel.
Enter dear, fragile Daisy, the doomed 8-year-old cousin, child of a very large family, whom Theresa takes under her wing for a few magical weeks during this special summer. Daisy, who is dying of as-year-undiagnosed leukemia that her parents and other adults have not even noticed, is the metaphor for Theresa's fast-fading childhood. She clings fiercely to Daisy in love and protection, holding on to her ever more tightly as Daisy inexorably fades away before her very eyes.
And when Theresa finally steps a toe into the sea of the world to come, the time-out-of-mind state she has managed to create dissolves as inexorably as the tide at the beach she visits with her charges every day.
This is a brilliant book. I wish I had not read it so that I could experience it all over again for the very first time. Highly recommended.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Spiritual Journey
Comment:
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