Fifteen is a year of clarity; you're still one of the kids, but you're finally beginning to unlock the mysteries of adult behavior. In her luminous novel Child of My Heart, Alice McDermott's narrator is a 15-year-old girl who has two qualities that give her access to the secret lives of adults: she's beautiful, and she looks after their children. Her beauty has already shaped her life. Her parents have moved the family to the east end of Long Island in hopes of finding her a wealthy husband, or at least a fancy crowd to run with. Here she babysits the children of the rich, whose fathers demonstrate their relative decency by making passes at her, or not. The novel spans a dreamy summer as our heroine spends her days with her various charges at the beach, happily leading her crew on home-grown, rather sweet adventures. Among the kids she looks after is a toddler whose father is a famous, aging artist. The narrator's preternatural acuity is apparent in this exchange with a new client: "Mrs. Richardson learned by direct inquiry that I lived in that sweet cottage with the dahlias (interested) and went to the academy (more interested) and babysat for this child of the famous artist (most interested) down the road." Child of My Heart is a pretty straightforward coming-of-age novel, but it's marked throughout by this beautifully honed, wry, knowing tone. McDermott's narrator reminds us that our lost innocence might not have been so innocent after all. --Claire Dederer
Alice McDermott won the National Book Award in 1998 for
Charming Billy. She is the author of four other novels:
At Weddings and Wakes, a
New York Times bestseller,
That Night; and
A Bigamist's Daughter. She lives with her family outside Washington, D.C.
Sheryl Bernstein’s audiobook credits included narrating for authors such as Alice McDermott, Susan Vreeland, and Susan Nolen-Hoeksema. Bernstein is also an accomplished voice-over actress. She has lent her voice to productions such as Spider-Man 3, Ultimate Spider-Man, Toy Story 2, and Aladdin.