Adult Onset

February 9, 2015
MacDonald’s (Fall on Your Knees) riveting drama features 48-year-old Mary Rose MacKinnon as she dutifully cares for her two young children in Toronto, outwardly making all the right choices with organic foods and extreme toddler proofing. Inwardly, however, she frets over potential disaster scenarios while struggling to retain a sense of self. Although Mary Rose writes young adult fiction and has a loyal fan base, she can’t make headway on the third novel in her trilogy. “She never imagined she would be a ‘morning person’ or drive a station wagon or be capable of following printed instructions for an array of domestic contraptions that come with some assembly required; until now, the only thing she had ever been able to assemble was a story.” During a week when her partner, Hilary, is out of town, Mary Rose reflects on her tumultuous childhood, which forced her to shoulder survivor’s guilt after the loss of would-be siblings, while coping with her lifelong painful bone condition. Glimmers of escalating anger—a family trait—begin to creep through her constructed veneer in Hilary’s absence. MacDonald’s strong narrative is a compelling examination of the loneliness and the often-absurd helplessness of being a parent of young children.

February 1, 2015
Assaulted by mysterious pains and bracketed by painful childhood memories, Mary Rose MacKinnon engages in power struggles with her willful toddler and endures the stresses of stay-at-home parenting while her partner, Hilary, is out of town. An acclaimed young-adult novelist, Mary Rose is suffering from severe writer's block, unable to complete the third volume in her popular series. Despite the surface comforts of life in her liberal, upper-middle-class Toronto enclave, she feels an inexplicable sense of alienation from her environment; she distances herself from the other mothers at her child's preschool and avoids communication with her own parents, despite their belated acceptance of her homosexuality and loving acceptance of Hilary and their grandchildren. When Mary Rose's charming Lebanese mother, Dolly, was younger, she had numerous miscarriages, stillbirths and babies who died shortly after birth, and she seems to be fixating on this tragic period many decades later. The effect of this sad legacy on family dynamics has never been fully explored, and Mary Rose has many vague, unspoken questions about her own childhood, the answers to which might help explain her emotional paralysis and phantom arm pains, as well as the mysterious bone cysts she suffered as a young girl. MacDonald (The Way the Crow Flies, 2004, etc.) integrates three narratives into this novel-Mary Rose's mundane day-to-day existence, Dolly's experience of severe depression as a young mother lamenting her lost babies, and Mary Rose's novels, which parallel elements of her own family story distorted through the lens of teen fantasy fiction. While clever, the novel within the novel seems a bit forced. There is a recurring theme of impostors and doppelgangers and a shrewd twinning motif, but the reader is always conscious of the writer's craft. Of the three, Dolly's story is the most naturalistically and sensitively portrayed. Despite the too-neat Freudian implications of Mary Rose's story, this is an affecting, multilayered account of domestic ennui and the painful effects of long-held secrets on three generations.

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April 1, 2015

As winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and a finalist for many more, Canadian author MacDonald (Fall on Your Knees) comes with sterling credentials reflected in the engrossing flow of this book. YA fiction author Mary Rose MacKinnon has put her career on hold to tend to the two young children she has with her partner, Hil, who's spreading her wings as a theater director. The frazzled insanity of parenthood is well rendered here, but Mary Rose is also dealing with physical and psychic pain from her past. Her military father and unbalanced mother, Dolly, of Lebanese descent, lost two babies, including one who would have been named Mary Rose, and as a youngster Mary Rose suffered pain in her arm that led to multiple bone surgeries. The pain is returning, as is a sense that there's more to her difficulties than her parents admit. In addition, their resistance when she came out has melted but still troubles Mary Rose, who's worrying Hil by drifting closer to the edge. VERDICT Though the book seems somewhat drawn out, the fine, clearly detailed writing makes for an accomplished read blending the familiar parental/spousal angst with the specifics of Mary Rose's struggle.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

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