Book Review

Precious
by Sandra Novack
Random House, 2009
http://www.sandranovack.com
AISN: B001NLL4M8

Sandra Novack's Precious begins as a novel of childhood experience, replete with childhood's fantastical daydreams and hidden secrets. Sissy Kisch, nine years old, wakes from a dream of being stolen by gypsies, but it is really her best friend Vicki who disappears one day on her bicycle and heralds the novel's central construct, from which Novack adeptly and intimately reaches into the lives of those affected.

Novack does well to take advantage of the landscape of surreal, drawn out summers of childhood and growing up, in which waiting seems impossible, but inevitable. Sissy and her sister Eva, already deeply affected by their mother leaving the family at Christmastime, begin their summer with little guidance—Eva at 17 stepping into a role of caretaking that she resents and rebels from, often leaving Sissy alone by herself, to instead meet with a young, married teacher with whom she is having an affair. A girl taking on an adult role both domestically and sexually, Eva bridges Novack's exploration of the thoughts and feelings of childhood and adulthood—hers exist somewhere between the immediacy of the childhood excitement and pain that Sissy feels and the buried longings and fears displayed by the adults.

Not only does Novack show a careful understanding of the levels of exposing and hiding that people engage in at different periods in their lives, she shifts perspectives seamlessly, and exposes the inner lives of her characters in remarkable detail. Major characters such as Sissy, Eva, and their parents, as well as minor characters—including a gossipy neighbor, the missing girl's mother, and the wife of the teacher—all receive due attention.

The sisters' mother Natalia's sudden return denotes a shift from things being hidden to things being exposed, and, as in many mother-daughter stories, the failures that occur are heartbreaking—whether in the lack of passing down much-needed advice or in the difficulty of deciding between a partner and a child. Natalia is a keeper of her own childhood secrets, and is the central isolated woman of the book, although she attempts reparations to keep her family together. Vicki's disappearance might mark Precious as reminiscent of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, but Natalia's presence helps it to more closely recall Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, in the figure of a woman justifying her choices to the neighborhood women who keep watch.

The joint crises of the novel culminate with slightly too much structural convenience in their resolution—one of them leaving questions about a characters' fate that are uncomfortable for the reader as well—but the eloquence with which Novack conveys this period of time that changes her characters' lives, and the regrets that haunt them as they look back, is unmistakable, encouraging a reader to think on them again and again.—Ashlie Kauffman