Cambridge

January 20, 2014
Susanna, a “cranky and difficult” young girl with complicated parental relations, recalls her formative years, traveling from English shores to Grecian temples, in this fictional memoir, which, as the title implies, focuses on the period she and her academic parents lived in Cambridge, Mass. Despite the somewhat predictable nature of Susanna’s feelings (“They’d be sorry when I froze to death two blocks away, a pathetic little creature with only my bicycle for a friend”) and the lengthy digressions on topics like piano lessons, this raw, biting autobiographical novel from the author of Girl, Interrupted frequently lights up to the point of incandescence with subtle descriptions and astute, witty anecdotes. The depiction of the courtship between Susanna’s piano teacher and her Swedish nanny, Frederika, in which the narrator’s mother and a few other key characters play strong supporting roles, is a literary tour-de-force, neatly displaying Kaysen’s unique talent for creating an engaging ensemble cast that comes uniquely alive under adolescent eyes: “Mascara, a swipe of red lipstick, and a dab of rouge could transform Frederika into a monster in two minutes. It was terrifying.” Susanna may not be the most likeable young girl, and she certainly spends a good deal of time wallowing in self-pity (“I could keep growing and thinking and reading in secret, in my dark, sorry-for-myself basement of failure and neglect, like a little rat”), but for Kaysen and her legion of fans, the focus on adolescence is a theme that works. And why not? Sometimes, parental neglect or some other sad reality is just a fact of life, and the effects are, unfortunately, affectingly real.

January 1, 2014
A woman recalls her childhood in a tony Boston suburb in ways that closely resemble Kaysen's real life (The Camera My Mother Gave Me, 2001, etc.). Susanna, the narrator of this elegantly written but curious novel, is a precocious girl who has intelligence to spare but a strong dislike for rules. As the novel opens in 1955, she's a second-grader who resents being uprooted from her American home to England, where her Harvard-educated economist father teaches for a spell, and Italy, where she receives an early education in both art and her mother's demanding expectations. Back home the following year, Susanna halfheartedly pursues music under the tutelage of a young conductor who's enamored of the family's nanny; Kaysen describes Susanna's modest musical revelations and family dinner parties with a winning sense of how children process the intriguing and baffling world of grown-ups. The book follows Susanna through the late 1950s as her relationship with her mother undergoes some modest strain, the nanny-conductor relationship ends, and the family spends a drowsy summer in Greece. This is all wryly, gently told, but it also feels dramatically thin, more like a snapshot than a work of fiction with a definable arc. (The biggest late-stage tension in the book is the arrival of Susanna's first period.) The parallels between the narrator's and author's lives are unavoidable; both grew up in Cambridge, for instance, and both have an economist father who spent time in London and Greece and later worked at the White House. Is this lightly fictionalized memoir from a best-selling memoirist or fiction with touches of memoir? Though her prose is luxurious and well-turned, the book's anecdotal, relatively shapeless form diminishes its impact. A belletristic vision of tweendom, earnest but inchoate.

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February 1, 2014
Cambridge, Massachusetts, is seven-year-old Susanna's everything. She's an anxious child and, as such, takes great comfort in the familiarity of her neighborhood. But at the start of second grade, in the 1950s, her father, a Harvard economics professor, uproots the family for a dark, damp sabbatical in Englandwhere she's introduced to that other Cambridge. Once the family is back home again, the chapters focus on the minutiae of daily life: boredom in school; her friendship with the son of two psychoanalysts; the complexities of her relationship with her mother; and music lessons with an Indian conductor. Sixth grade is once again spent abroad, this time in Greece, where it's one hot, dusty field trip after the next. When Susanna returns to Cambridge for the duration, the city's changedor perhaps she's changedas she notes that her childhood, a mostly unhappy one, has passed. Kaysen, the best-selling author of Girl, Interrupted (1993), offers a melancholic, poignant, and sharply observed account of a precocious child's struggle to make sense of her place in the family and in the larger world.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

October 15, 2013

Having captured our attention in 1993 with the blazing memoir Girl, Interrupted, which has sold more than a million copies, Kaysen now offers what's billed as a fictional prequel. Heroine Susanna has loved growing up in 1950s Cambridge, MA, amid the smarties and arties swarming Harvard Square, so she's not that keen on her family's spending a sabbatical year abroad. Then she returns home to discover the meaning of love and art with orchestra conductor Vishwa. Big tour, big promotion, and a reading group guide.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2014

This latest novel from Kaysen (Asa, As I Knew Him) follows a character named Susanna from the second to the sixth grade, taking her through four countries, a Swedish nanny, and a Brahman piano teacher who never makes her play. Susanna leads an unconventional life and is not happy about it. Maladjusted, awkward, and lonely, she has only one friend her age, and he lives in Cambridge, MA. Kids are just one more reason to hate school, but though she spends most of her time abroad in the company of adults, they make no more sense to her than do her classmates. What she does love is the English language, and Susanna's facility with language allows Kaysen to create tension and humor around experiences that would seem insignificant to an adult but that Susanna finds traumatic. VERDICT Although Susanna's despair and confusion are palpable throughout, this is not a depressing work. Susanna is a curious girl whose travels often leave her awestruck. Readers of literary fiction and novels about academic life will find the globe-trotting parents interesting, if not ideal protectors. Anticipate additional interest from viewers of the film based on Kaysen's 1993 memoir, Girl, Interrupted. [See Prepub Alert, 9/23/13.]--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.