Author: Julie Wright
Eyes Like Mine has an interesting premise: a pioneer woman in the 1850s and her fifth-great-granddaughter in 2009 both have crises. They both pray and fall asleep, and when they wake up, the grandmother (Constance) has time traveled to be with Liz. Constance soon realizes that she can't get home to her husband and baby unless she helps Liz and her family sort out the problems in their lives, namely the divorce of Liz's parents and the ensuing fallout.
While I thought Wright did a good job of constructing Liz's character (as well as the other teenagers in the book), I had problems with the adult characters. It seems highly unrealistic and even potentially damaging for a character like
Clair to go from being so depressed she was contemplating suicide and sleeping around the clock to fully functioning as a parent after a stern-talking to and a bottle of pills flushed down the toilet. It seems especially unrealistic for her to be functioning that normally since those events took place just a couple of days before her ex-husband's wedding. Also, the cowboy went from being a total jerk who was running around scaring kids to the hero, the guy who made it possible for Liz to keep her horse. It would have been beneficial to have a more nuanced characterization there too. If he's such a jerk, why does Liz want to have a business relationship with him?
While it's not hard for people looking in from the outside of a divorce to believe that it's all one person's fault, I think it's true that both partners have some degree of responsibility in most divorces. In this book, Clair is pretty blameless, and Tom, Liz's dad, functions as not much more than a stock villain. He cheats, he shacks up with a cute young thing, he gets excommunicated, he gets married again before the ink on the divorce papers is dry, he sneaks into his ex-wife's house and terrorizes her, he doesn't want his kids around, and he lives high on the hog while his kids suffer financially. I think it would be much more realistic to show some of his good points, because that would make the situation more complicated, and ultimately, more heartbreaking. Constance's character is somewhat troubling as well. She sure does a lot of lecturing for someone who is only 19.
1 comment:
These are all very good questions. I confess I did not think of any of them as I was reading--I am a sucker for a good pioneer story, and I didn't notice the [extremely valid] problems you pointed out with the adult relationships.
I think one reason I liked this was that I read it just after reading another finalist that has a girl dealing with a similar situation, and I thought this one was handled with so much more depth that I gave it a pass on other things.
And I will confess: I totally cried when I read it. I suspended disbelief enough that I got weepy. I am a sap sometimes. It's the funeral potato side of me.
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