The Tiny One: A Novel - Hardcover

Minot, Eliza

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 037540645X ISBN 13: 9780375406454

Publisher: Knopf, 1999

Synopsis

Via Revere is eight years old when her mother is killed in a car wreck on a winter road in Massachusetts. Cast into the anguish of grief, totally bewildered by her mother's disappearance, and mystified by the notion of death itself, Via tries to hold on to her mother in the only way she knows how: by telling what she knows, and by remembering, in excruciating detail, the day her mother died. The Tiny One captures a single day in the life of a young child grappling with immeasurable grief and loss: from the dreadful moment when she is taken out of math class and led to the principal's office to hear the news, to all the daydreams and recollections that swim through a child's mind -- of summers in Maine, mornings in bed with her sleeping parents, car trips, rivalries and affections among her many siblings, growing pains and the older boys at the pool who give Via such a ticklish feeling in her belly she wants to "climb up on them and, like, wriggle around." But mainly Via holds a microscope up to her day in the hope that if she musters all of her eight-year-old good sense, she can riddle out death's logic, and find the crack in the world through which her mother must have slipped.

With clarity, sensitivity, and precision, Eliza Minot captures the voice of a vibrant, intelligent child swept unexpectedly into a sea of sorrow and confusion. More than this, she gives us a young narrator whose innate wisdom has something to teach us all -- a child who extracts a remarkable lesson from her first brutal encounter with the arbitrary, inscrutable forces of chance and accident. This is the story of a little girl who has a reckoning with death and comes, instinctively, to what remains: to love, and through love, to life.

About this title

About the Author

Eliza Minot was born in Beverly, Massachusetts. She lives in New York with her husband. The Tiny One is her first novel.

From the Inside Flap

s eight years old when her mother is killed in a car wreck on a winter road in Massachusetts. Cast into the anguish of grief, totally bewildered by her mother's disappearance, and mystified by the notion of death itself, Via tries to hold on to her mother in the only way she knows how: by telling what she knows, and by remembering, in excruciating detail, the day her mother died. <b>The Tiny One</b> captures a single day in the life of a young child grappling with immeasurable grief and loss: from the dreadful moment when she is taken out of math class and led to the principal's office to hear the news, to all the daydreams and recollections that swim through a child's mind -- of summers in Maine, mornings in bed with her sleeping parents, car trips, rivalries and affections among her many siblings, growing pains and the older boys at the pool who give Via such a ticklish feeling in her belly she wants to "climb up on them and, like, wriggle around." But mainly Via holds a microscope u

Reviews

Chronicling the same family dynamics and pivotal events as her sister Susan Minot in Monkeys, Eliza Minot makes an impressive debut with this moving novel of a close-knit family disrupted by a sudden, tragic death. The remarkably true voice of eight-year-old Via Mahoney Revere is Minot's triumph here, as the stunned child tries to absorb the fact that her beloved mother has died in a car accident. In a trance of disjointed sorrow, Via retraces the fateful day, recalling the routine progression of her fourth grade classes to the moment when she hears the news. One memory triggers another, flooding her mind with incidents ranging through her secure and protected childhood. Through the layers of episodic recollection emerges a clear and textured picture of a comfortable upper-middle-class Catholic family living in a Massachusetts coastal town, spending summers on an island in Maine, skiing in New Hampshire and sunning in Bermuda. Mum is vibrantly present in all of Via's memories, a tender and actively affectionate maternal figure who jokes with her kids in easy vernacular. Via is the last born of four siblings, and the smallest. Still young enough for kisses and squeezes, she is enveloped in a warm cocoon of loving care; "small fry," her mother calls her fondly, and "pint-sized." The bedrock of credibility here, and the source of the book's emotional truth, is Minot's ability to recall a child's fresh sensory perceptions. Abundant humor suffuses the mixture of wonder and bewilderment with which Via tries to interpret the world, and her childish opinions about cereal box prizes and TV cartoons and why she loves pickles. Yet we never forget that a child awakened to grief is summoning these comforting memories as solace. Minot's prose pulses with similes and graceful images. To Via, the ocean on a hot day "looks like dried paint that a ball would bounce on." The reader's emotional response rises as the chapters progress toward the moment when Via's life will suffer the irrevocable blow. In its poignant denouement, this narrative of domestic happiness and heartrending grief culminates in a radiant vision of eternal love. 5-city reading tour. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In her nicely observed and sharply written debut novel, Minot, with generally satisfying results, offers the biography of an eight-year-old girl on the occasion of her mothers death. Via Revere, who as the story opens has just learned of her Mums death, intends to catalogue the day of her dying, frightened she will lose her mother if she forgets it. The novel is actually Vias vivid recounting of her own biography through a string of anecdotes, told in the present tense, gathered around the theme of her perfect family happiness. Living in Massachusetts, the Reveres spend summers at Sky Island in Maine and winters skiing in New Hampshire. Mum and Dad are uniformly gentle, sensitive, and admirably parental, and Vias brothers Cy and Pete and her sister Marly are happily teasing, intelligent, and humane (uniformity of character in the novel, if a flaw, is still true to the vision of the eight-year-old were reading). Via herself is of course precocious, as is evident not only from her high standing in math, but from the deft perceptions and agility of her narrative. Hovering over these simple, innocent, and extended sketches of snuggles in bed, clam digs, and childish irritations is the readers knowledge of Vias mothers impending death. The day in question isnt much: waking up, taking a bath, waiting for the bus, going to school. At school, there's history, art, math, and Vias father's arrival with the news. Vias own voice is Minots signal achievement. A distant cousin of Nicholson Bakers fastidious adult itemizers, Via presents a persuasive childs point of view, but, given the dewy golden glow of the story until the news is broken to Via, her mother's death does not seem crushing. Minot, as though, understanding this, intervenes with brief, vaguely philosophical remarks about loss and childhood innocence. An adeptly textured first novel, in all. Minot shows skill in a story flush with detail but not overburdened by significance. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Minot's powerful first novel introduces Via Revere, a plucky and adored third grader, the youngest child of a wealthy Massachusetts couple who is forced to come to terms with grief, loss, and a rapidly shifting family dynamic when her mother is killed in a car wreck. Via, who narrates her own story, is by turns whiny and articulate, future-focused and reflective, accepting and full of questions. As with all children, there are times you want Via to go away and leave you alone; at other times, however, she will enchant you and move you to tears; for better or for worse, Minot writes this young life with amazing authenticity. And although several story lines go nowhere and appear as loose threads in an otherwise well-woven tale, the book nonetheless resonates and shines. Recommended for all public libraries.AEleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The frame of this poignant first novel is the day eight-year-old Via Revere learns of her mother's death in a car crash. In chapters divided into the sections of an average fourth-grader's school day (breakfast, reading class, recess, etc.), Via's narrative loops back from the events of the tragic day to earlier scenes with her large family at home in Connecticut or summering in Maine--her childhood lost. Through Minot, Via's common, almost banal moments in an intelligent, well-cared-for child's life often become remarkable in their authenticity. This is a writer who seems to remember acutely the emotional terrain of childhood--the endless, random energy; the innocent and violent curiosities; fascination with the senses and the body; and the fierce love for family. While the young voice wavers at times, and some of the sequencing and scene choices seem uneven, readers will appreciate the book's powerful moments illuminating a child's love for her parent, and will feel Via's loss at the book's end. Gillian Engberg

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ONE: Staying with Puddle


Via Revere. She's just a kid in the morning except that she's sitting still on her bed in the thick of far-gone winter with her mouth parted open like a grown woman's in thought. Life's got her for the first time pinned up against a wall, openmouthed. But other than her mouth, and her stillness, the rest of her's pure kid, but stunned. She's slouched and static, puffy-eyed, staring at the rug where it meets the wood floor. She's sitting waiting, lopsided, dumbstruck, not even thinking yet what to think.

Her mother would have put her in the gray flannel or Black Watch plaid dress. Instead Via's wearing an Easter dress that curdles, but nicely, with the raw winter surrounding her. Its white cotton is springlike, clean and pleated, cool over her dark wool tights. Lavender smocking is embroidered across her chest, and her young fresh head grows up out of the starched scalloped collar that petals at the neck. Her hair's got so much static that she can feel it clinging silky to her cheek, buzzing, tickling at the side of her chapped mouth.

One of the cats jumps up beside her and arches to rub along her arm. She pats it without looking at it and with her electricity gives it a little shock so the kitty twitches its whiskers but keeps purring. Via twitches too, her eye, but keeps staring.

She's just a kid and it's morning but nothing's the same. Everything's different now. She's at the beginning of a new chapter. She's perched at the edge of a new era. Grief has been born boring into her soft ripe life full of cartwheels and digging with sticks, leaves and laughter, sky and light, her mother's face and jumps in the air. Grief's been injected like a strange sedative that has the opposite effect -- it wakes you up. It's jarred her like shaking her shoulders. It has her. The grizzle of life has rattled her numb. It's like she's been whacked in the head out of laughter and now she sits alone on her bed, looking out, in awe at anything, in awe at everything, stunned.

Hearing the news is like this: The day was like other days and then it happened. Then the news came like those film clips where huge buildings sway gracefully to the ground like someone's sucking them down with a vacuum. It's a whirl of air. It's a night of movement with billowing as the darkness is go everything go, everything moves, disheveled and alive, rushing with sound. Then suddenly it is silent. It's like the sound has been turned off but you're watching a storm. The trees bend like slingshots and the leaves tornado up into the air. Where is the sound? And then it is over.

Then it is over and it's morning. You've heard the news. You'd almost rather hear it again -- fresh -- than begin a life with what you know now. It is morning. It is a morning when everything is hit white-yellow and windows of buildings shine in dull flashes. The windshields of slowly moving cars turn weak sun in your eyes. You wince. You feel like a fever that's petrified.

It's her older sister Marly's voice in the door behind her. "You ready?"

Then it's her father. "All set?"

They're in the door together but Via doesn't want to turn around to see.

Marly comes and sits beside her. "All set?" she says, like her father just did.

Via nods. She pats the cat Puddle and listens to the purring. "She's purring," Via says.

"Come on," says Marly, nudging her. Marly heads toward the bureau. "I'll get you a sweater."

"No," says Via.

"No what?"

"No sweater."

"You'll freeze, V."

"I don't think I will."

"Well you think wrong," says Marly. "Look at it out there."

Via looks up from the floor to look out the window. She doesn't remember yesterday. Today looks like it's trying to snow.

"I want to stay here with Puddle," Via says.

Marly goes over to her. Marly squats down and looks at her little sister in the eye. "You want to stay with Puddle?" Marly asks her.

Via nods.

"It's not time to go yet," says Marly. "Want me to come get you when it's time to go?"

Via nods again. "Yeah," she says. She's patting Puddle.

Marly kisses Via's forehead as she's standing up. "We'll all be right downstairs if you want to come down," Marly tells her. "Okay?"

" 'Kay," says Via.

When Marly leaves, Via looks back up out the window while she listens to Puddle purr. It's as white as can be out there. Only the rattly knuckled trees are dark and still against the icy snow that's beneath them and behind them. Above the world is the long white sky, open and bare.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 037540645X
• ISBN 13: 9780375406454
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272