Suzanna Klein was a baby when her mother got up early one morning to rob a bank with a group of fellow radicals. Now, every Saturday, Suzanna lines up at the prison gates among the other children, each dressed as if for celebration. Inside there is a nursery and a cemetery; there are watchful guards and distractable nuns; there are women counting down to release and women like Suzanna’s mother, who will never be released. Suzanna vows to return to the hill forever, but her mother wants her to be free.
Superb ... Clark’s novel is a brilliantly deprived bildungsroman ... From the novelist’s point of view, the story’s fatal glamour skews it toward memoir: Why fictionalize such remarkable facts? Clark’s wise remedy is to strip her fiction of most of those facts, reducing the local references so that the narrative shifts away from singular autobiography toward singular emblem.
t’s a testament to Harriet Clark’s skill that the true subject of this novel—the long, damaging legacy of three generations of mother-daughter estrangement—slowly reveals itself ... One of the funniest books I have read in a while, with deadpan one-liners, bitterly comic in the way only someone aware of the stakes can make a joke ... Meditative.
Reads as though it has intermittent weather, clear and obscured, literal and mysterious. A movingly written and enjoyably unexpected debut about sifting fate from a set of curious and challenging circumstances.
