I Am Zoe Hanke (A Fine First Edition)

Born in 1941 when her mother was only nineteen, Zoe faces her mother's lifelong anger only after Zoe goes off to college and lives on her own for the first time

"I was born into my mother's madness," observes Zoe Handke, nearing 40, in Larsen's charged and introspective study of a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship. Zoe staves off emotional collapse by continually sifting images of childhood events and personalities that molded her. Often, young Zoe felt dangerously close to her physically abusive mother ("I was a mirror. My mother wanted me broken"), who was given to rageful outbursts and fabrications, and seemed to detest her daughter's very existence. Zoe's father, a mechanic from Missouri, was a shadowy, ineffectual figure in this working-class Illinois family. At college in Minnesota, Zoe endured self-punishing episodes of blindness and deafness--expressions of the terrible guilt her mother instilled in her. How she regains her faculties, marries and has children of her own is conveyed in extended reflective sections of almost shattering intensity. In a remarkable performance, Larsen ( An American Memory ) magically unravels a family's system of denial, reward, blame and myth.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Although Larsen's first novel, An Ameri can Memory , won the first Heartland Prize in 1988, this first-person account of Zoe and her relationship with her family is disappointing. Although the static prose is more collage than narrative, the reader is evidently supposed to be drawn on by the mysterious, powerful language and such self-important, self-absorbed declarations as "My mother was doomed. Therefore I was doomed with her." Such moments create a spurious tension, tricking the reader into believing that something is going to happen when, in fact, the story is a collection of memories pasted together to form a curiously unsatisfying whole. Larsen fails to make us care about the ultrasensitive Zoe. We recognize her as being somehow ersatz, like artificially flavored candy--even though it tastes like strawberry and it's good, you know it's not the real thing.
- Linda L. Rome, Geauga Cty. P.L., Middlefield, Ohio
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.