Synopsis
Losing Eddie is a first novel stunningly narrated by a nameless nine-year-old who sees herself as the outsider in her own family.
Inside her home, disaster draws her mother into bouts of terrible sadness and drives her father to drink. Her brother-in-law is a drinker, too, and abusive, so her sister's come home with her twin babies. Her older brother, Eddie, just out of jail, seems determined to get put back in. Her accident-prone younger brother sops up whatever attention remains.
Our little narrator watches, records, recounts. Seeing, hearing, touching, and storing it up to tell back to herself is one thing. Making sense of it is another.
The physical setting of this child's story is defined by a two-lane road that cuts through a remote corner of New Brunswick. The emotional setting is the strife and struggle of poverty - in all its guises, a place laid open by a child's dear and unjudgmental account of one year's tribulation inside its farmhouses, graveyards, churches, inside its one-room school and its charity old folks' home.
Privy to the inner workings of this jealous, scrappy girl's mind, the reader is witness to her discovery of herself against the dark backdrop of daily turmoil. To watch her turning her crystallized observations toward the light is to understand the staunchness of human curiosity and intellect. To hear her, at the very end of her story, name herself in a narrative voice that rings forth with her sharp, innocent perception of love, is to know how miracles work.
Reviews
YA-Through a first-person narration, readers view a nameless nine-year-old girl and see how she and her dysfunctional family cope with the accidental death of her brother. YAs will sense the grinding poverty present in the farmhouse and realize that these people's lives are very grim. The book contains adult themes such as drunkenness, mental illness, physical spousal abuse, and incest between two children. This is not a happy story as it recounts the tribulations of one year in the lives of a rural Canadian family, but it is an honest one.
Marguerite O'Connor, R.E. Lee High School, Springfield, VA
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Disastrous events that befall a rural family are realistically depicted in this modern-day tragedy, Corey's debut. Presented from the point of view of a nine-year-old-girl, it is a story rendered with sincerity and ingenuousness, one in which a child's tenaciously held hopes--for her mother's sanity, her father's sobriety and her three siblings' self-preservation--seem painfully unlikely to be fulfilled. The narrator, whose failure to reveal her name suggests her insecurity, describes the events that lead to a crisis among the members of her already troubled clan. Her older brother, Eddie, who has been serving time at reform school for drunk driving, has returned to the family's home in New Brunswick, Canada, where his parents anticipate that he'll make a fresh start. Despite their concern, however, Eddie's rebellious behavior bodes ill. Corey creates a heartbreaking portrait made even more poignant by the narrator's innocence. Laborious at times--if only because the speaker is so clearly unable to affect her environment--this novel ends with an intended catharsis that nonetheless falls short of negating its overall fatalism.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
A nine-year-old girl survives a succession of family tragedies--in an uneven first novel by Corey, born and raised in New Brunswick, Canada. Consider what little Laura experiences over the course of a year in her home in rural Canada. The husband of Sister slaps his wife around in the yard and later terrorizes the household with a gun before being disarmed by Daddy. Eddie, Laura's 15-year-old brother, returns from reform school; he's already an alcoholic, just like Daddy. Soon his drunk driving leads to a fatal crash. His death devastates Mama, who is twice institutionalized in the asylum. Meanwhile, the mother of Laura's best friend Marilyn wastes away and dies; another friend, Audrey, commits incest with her brother (``I do it with Dino all the time''); and Laura is partially responsible for the near-death by drowning of younger brother Bucky. None of this is what happens to the families Laura sees on television, but she gamely tries to say things ``that will maybe make us pretend that everything in our family is okay.'' She prays a lot to Jesus. She deftly reverses roles, calming her mother with a hand to the brow, consoling her Daddy while downplaying her own needs. Her tenth birthday is happy enough that this diminutive Job can say, ``It's a good thing to finally be together.'' Freshness of language and observation mark Corey as a promising newcomer, but she's hobbled herself here by overdoing the disasters and having Laura tell us about them in the historic present--not a fruitful tense for the limited consciousness of a nine-year-old. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
The collective family sadness of losing a child, as seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old, is the focus of this first novel. Corey demonstrates much bright promise with her spare prose, though her story line is depressing. Eddie, fresh from reform school, is killed; Mama has two breakdowns; Daddy sits in the wellhouse and drinks beer; Sister has twin babies and an abusive husband; brother Bucky almost drowns; and the neighbor across the road dies and the children of the religious nuts up the road are incestuous. Our narrator feels bereft, ignored, jealous of the attention paid to others, and slightly off-kilter in her year of angst. In the end, everybody bucks up and goes on. This is a soap opera, but Corey writes beautifully. She seems to be asking, Where is the joy and fun of life that helps one go on?-- Dawn L. Anderson, North Richland Hills P.L., Tex.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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