Rear-View Mirrors

April 1, 1986
After ignoring Olivia for most of her 16 years, her father summons her to his rural New Hampshire home. She leaves her mother's California house to meet him, understanding neither his reclusion ("If it was true that no man is an island, my father was at least a peninsula,'') nor his need to see her. The summer passes, and while they spend much of their time exchanging barbs, Olivia and her father soften their feelings toward each other. She learns that she has an extended family, a new set of relatives, feeling no longer like a star, but part of a constellation. A year later, after her father's sudden death, Olivia returns to his home which will be hers when she is older. She reflects on the past, on those parts of herself that come from her mother or father, and those parts that are uniquely hers. Her father has given her the ability to see where she is going and where she has been at the same time. Olivia's emotional growth and eventual calm become the reader's own; Fleishman's gift for packing each sentence with both obvious and reflective meaning is evident here. The adolescent view is intelligent, mature and believable.

May 1, 1986
Gr 8 Up -As the title suggests, Rear-View Mirrors is a remembrance of things not long past. More prose elegy than novel, this thematically rich and well-written book recounts 17-year-old Olivia Tate's memories of her first encounter, the previous summer, with the father she has never known, her parents having been divorced when she was 8 months old. The first-person narrative cuts back and forth between two journeys: the one, in the present, is a bicycle ride which, as a rite of passage, completes the other, which was a journey to both knowledge of her father and herself begun the summer before. Each mile traveled, each day remembered, uncovers a new layer of personal self-discovery much as each stroke of an archaeologist's shovel uncovers a new layer of the past. And, so, it is not insignificant that Olivia decides, at the first summer's end, that archaeology will be her life's work. The skill with which Fleischman creates the characters of Olivia and her writer father Hannibal and with which he evokes the rural New Hampshire setting are occasions for joy and celebration and can only be matched by the extraordinary felicity of his prose style. Michael Cart, Beverly Hills Public Library