A Sampling of Reviews from Recent Books
If You Had a Family
From Booklist
Wilson's new novel is a meditation on the ties that bind, on the concept of, for lack of a better term, family. Southern California in the 1950s, beautifully evoked with its wildly colored flowers and apricot trees, is midwesterner Polly Winter's new home. She wants to cast off the strictures of her rigid Christian Scientist background and provide warmth and joy to her small daughter, Cory, and tiny son, Kevin. This dream shatters when, having postponed medical examination of a breast lump, she dies of cancer, leaving the children to their father, an emotionally absent orphan who creates a new category of orphanhood for bereaved Cory. After enduring repressed childhood memories and trauma for a quarter century, Cory must deal with the pain of her past as she struggles to make her relationship with Rosemary work. Wilson writes thoughtfully and tenderly, with obvious affection for the pieces of her characters' personalities that stubbornly don't quite fit into the picture of a problemless life.
Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood
From Booklist
Wilson's novel, If You Had a Family , heavily mined her Christian Science background: reared in the faith's ultraorthodoxy by her own superdevout, inflexible mother, the protagonist's mother relies too long on her faith, postpones seeing a doctor, and dies of cancer. In Blue Windows, Wilson removes fiction's facade and tells the gritty truth about her cancer-stricken mother, who attempted suicide, a guilty reaction to her self-perceived failure of faith: she drank Drano and thereby gave her doctors the task of skin-grafting her face back together to repair acid burns on her mouth, lips, tongue, and chin. After her death, Wilson's father married Bettye, who redecorated rooms and tried to redecorate lives; she forced Wilson into a puke-pink room and shut the girl's bookcase away in a closet. With time, Wilson made painful peace with her childhood and her mother's death. Her searing memoir deserves to find a mainstream audience well beyond the loyal following for her lesbian mysteries.
From Kirkus Reviews
This sensitive, eloquent coming-of-age story articulates the often painful intersections of religion, power, illness, and death. Mystery writer Wilson (Trouble in Transylvania, 1993, etc.) departs from fiction here to unveil her Christian Science upbringing in uncompromising, often disturbing detail. The crux of the book is how family and faith fall apart when the author's mother, a devout Christian Scientist, dies of breast cancer at a relatively young age (and after a failed suicide attempt). Given Christian Science's teaching that illness and death are merely errors of the mind that must be corrected, the family was forbidden to mourn this loss. Such denial meant that grief and anger were channeled into other, often horrifying, modes of expression: her father's remarriage to a sadistic woman and the author's own floundering, which made her receptive to her new stepbrother's sexual advances. In this sense, the book is an unforgettable testimony to the destructive powers of some religious beliefs. But paradoxically, it is also a nuanced acknowledgment of the ways in which sectarian religion orders the chaos of the world, providing new opportunities for its followers. Wilson concedes, for instance, that Christian Science healing continues to provide an important outlet for women, who comprise almost 90 percent of healers. She can also see that Christian Science helped her to define her own strength as a woman--her identity forged not just through surviving her mother's death but through more mundane statements of faith, such as her refusal to accept a school polio vaccine in the 1950s. Historically informed and refreshingly candid--though a bit too long--this offers not just an individual memoir of an increasingly obscure religious movement, but also a more general exploration of the crises of faith and health in the 20th century. (Of particular interest is Wilson's parallel of contemporary guru Deepak Chopra with Mary Baker Eddy.) --
Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Gaudi Afternoon
Cassandra Reilly is a footloose Irish-American based in London, who is currently in the midst of translating a magic realism novel about the search for a lost mother. When she gets an offer from a San Franciscan femme fatale to look for her husband in Barcelona, Cassandra can't resist--and she chases people of all genders in this highspirited comic thriller.
The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists
From Booklist
The many moods and shifting colors of Venice come alive in Wilson's masterful third in the Reilly European Trilogy. Cassandra arrives to help her friend, bassoonist Nicola Gibbons, who's been accused of stealing an antique bassoon while attending a conference on women musicians of the Vivaldi era. She arrives at a grand villa to find an odd assortment of conferees, including a Canadian bassoonist/scholar; a strangely drab and untalented Dutch oboist; a couple of tall Nordic baroque bassoonists embroiled in a teutonically torrid affair; and the hosts: the domineering, hot-tempered Alfredo Sandretti and his browbeaten son, Marco, who will do anything--anything?--to please him. Cassandra manages to locate the missing bassoon but finds that a murder by drowning has muddied the waters.
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