Uninvited Daughters

Categories: Rediscoveries , Fiction

Odessa Levin lives in a Vermont saltbox cottage sparely furnished with Shaker pieces of the sort she always longed for during her Long Island-Jewish childhood, which was, let’s say, somewhat more baroque.

 

She’s single, and she has pared the complications of her life down almost to nothing.  But now she’s beginning to wonder whether that was a good idea.

 

Into her life walks Megan Vasquez, a lonely and eccentric ten-year-old who’s suffering through the divorce of her Mexican-American father and her New-Age, WASP-rebel stepmother.

 

Of course, as every experienced fiction reader or moviegoer can guess, befriending Megan will bring lots of sticky complications to Odessa’s tidy, pseudo-Yankee life.  But of course that’s the delight of Elinor Spielberg’s 1993 debut, Uninvited Daughters.

 

Told with warmth and wit, this is a genuinely engaging and often funny book.  Despite the happy ending (fiction readers and moviegoers are going to expect that, too, after all), the book doesn’t get too cozy.  Spielberg is too sharply observant for that.  Here’s her description of a Vermont Easter—this ought to flash you back to the early 90s: 

 

 

“There was an outbreak of morals among the ex-flatlanders, who had recently discovered that family was the latest rage and were having one big Ralph Lauren “at home”:  going over to each other’s houses for after-church brunch dressed like their parents boarding the Queen Elizabeth in 1937.”  

 

That satiric edge cuts through the sweetness like a warm knife through cheesecake.  Delicious.  Fans of Nick Hornby’s About a Boy should try this.