Singing Songs Book

Anna's mother came home one day, scrubbed the apartment from top to bottom, brushed out her hair, and opened the door to a stranger. He was tall, with a smile that showed too many teeth, and the way he called Mama beautiful made Anna cry and hide. The stranger married Mama and moved in, bringing his family with him - two girls and a boy with gangly limbs, toast-colored hair, and no possessions of their own. So Anna had a new family and found that her life contained a new and forceful presence: Richard. Shaped by an exacting cinematic sensibility, Singing Songs explores how one family lives, centerless, caught in a flux of emotion and violence that touches and transforms each of its members. Nomadic and insular, Anna's family follows the shifting sands of temporary employment, fleeing from social workers, schools, and nearly all the conventions of society. Anna makes pets of barn owls and a fawn, and paints radiators with her hands during a summer work trip on the road. She pretends fiercely, imagines grandly, and when Richard comes upstairs at night for "kissing lessons," she winds herself and her sister tightly in a sheet, cocoon-like, for protection. And gradually, with all the force of innocence and a fierce loyalty to herself, Anna seizes pieces of the world as her own. Singing Songs is the masterful realization of a young girl's journey to adulthood in a chaotic, abusive, and fragmented world; an affirmation of a child's ability to use her judgment and imagination alone to light her way. It is the story of a strange and beautiful metamorphosis and a profound statement about the dark and secret places of family life.

Publishers Weekly

Sometimes creativity blesses twice: Tilly, an actress best known for her portrayal of Chloe, the luminous young lover of the recent suicide in The Big Chill , has written an impressive first novel. Fashioned in short, cinematic vignettes, the story is related from Anna's bravely innocent point of view, which expands as she grows from a preschooler to a preteen. Anna lives with her large family in a variety of squalid locations, finally settling on an island in the Northwest. Her Radcliffe-educated mother, deserted by her well-to-do husband, has become a careless slut; she has married an older man who turns out to be a ``layabout,'' a child-beater and -molester. Anna's many siblings, blood and step, try to make it against these terrible odds, while Anna herself struggles unsuccessfully to cushion them from her stepfather's brutality and lechery, fiercely tries to protect herself from a number of sexual assaults and attempts to wrest some comfort from her overwrought mother. The young girl finds solace in the natural world: in a pet fawn who briefly lives in the bathroom and in baby owls who ride her shoulders. She revels in having her own room (a pantry closet) and proudly learns to shoplift. In retaining Anna's artless and natural voice, Tilly gives her credibility. Anna's clear-eyed perspective, generous nature and fighting spirit will make readers wish her success--but the novel's irresolute, troubling ending hardly promises a brighter future. (June)