Parkhurst is especially deft at examining the complexities facing parents of autistic children. She doesn’t resurrect the disproven vaccines-are-the-cause argument, but she makes clear how frustrated parents, even educated ones, might grasp at any explanation for what has changed their lives so drastically ... [she] truly excels at bringing Alexandra and Iris to life, her terrific prose matched by compassion and a sense of humor ... her best work, a haunting, creepy but ultimately moving story of love and family.
The rare alchemy of achingly powerful words that also induce fevered page riffling is in abundance in Harmony, Carolyn Parkhurst’s sumptuously written, eminently compelling novel about a family and its desperation. Readers will be torn between a desire to pause to admire a golden paragraph and the compulsion to hasten on to find out what happens next.
...the strange and fascinating thing about Harmony is how it uses its female points of view to turn the male characters into evocative mysteries ... Harmony is a frustratingly short book that skips past the chance to fully develop some of the plot hooks it teases...answers come with startling abruptness, cutting off a compelling, seductive narrative that could have sustained much more thorough exploration. Harmony's strengths come in its observations about what it takes to parent an unpredictable, unusual child.
...in Parkhurst’s deft treatment, Harmony becomes a story of our time, a compassionate treatise on how society judges parents, how parents judge themselves and how desperation sometimes causes otherwise rational people to choose irrational lives ... Harmony has a strong plot moved forward by Iris’s keen observations. If the story is largely predictable, it sometimes zags just when you expect it to zig ... It’s in Alexandra’s chapters that we find the soul of this novel. Here, Parkhurst cements herself as a writer capable of astonishing humanity and exquisite prose, someone whose wisdom parents and their judges should heed.
The story is darkly funny and suspenseful, with a palpable sense of dread that propels readers toward anticipatory horror. Parkhurst draws the Hammond family with depth and sensitivity. She writes Tilly profoundly, as an audacious girl fascinated by a world that will not bend to her ... The novel stumbles on Parkhurst's flimsy characterization of Bean, which renders him unconvincing as the charismatic but deranged sage who lures the family away from their home.
If this novel is part Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and part We Need to Talk About Kevin, it also contains shades of Lord of the Flies. For this, young Iris is the perfect narrator. She is stroppily resentful of the attention Tilly receives, but fiercely protective of her big sister ... This is a fascinating novel, at once challenging and compassionate, thrilling and thoughtful. It asks tough questions about what happens to people who don’t fit predetermined patterns, and what it means to be normal.
...a moving and compassionate literary dive straight into the heart of a frantic parent ... Parkhurst is a sincere and crafty writer. Alexandra’s perspective on the grueling history of her efforts to care for Tilly is presented in the second-person present tense, yielding a shatteringly immediate portrait ... Harmony is an intriguing book, although I’m not sure it’s my kind of book: the sentences lack the architectural ingenuity that feeds my reading habit, and the adult characters, while full of angst, lack singularity.
