The story of how a seemingly 'normal' family could become desperate enough to leave everything behind and move to a child behavioral camp in New Hampshire.
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.
