Reviews for When Madeline Was Young

The average rating for When Madeline Was Young based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-03-16 00:00:00 Jeff Volsky My first book by Jane Hamilton and I liked it. At the start, she used this shocking premise: The narrator's eldest sister Madeline is actually the first wife of the narrator's father. Madeline had a bicycle accident few months after she got married to his father and when she got healed, she ended up having the mind of a 7-year old child. So, I thought the story would be as melodramatic as Jodi Piccoult's novels that normally employ rare medical conditions to create a convoluted family drama coupled with deeply emotional characters to create soaking-wet-hanky moments for her female fans. No! Maybe that's the reason why Jane Hamilton's novels are not as popular as Jodi Piccoult's but this definitely does not mean inferior. In fact, Jane Hamilton has the sensitivity of Alice McDermott (in her After This) as this novel and that Pulitzer-finalist novel both tackle American family drama with Vietnam War as a backdrop as they depict ordinary Heartland USA drama. Jane Hamilton's characters are not as wickedly strange as Anne Tyler's too. However, Hamilton's are just like you and I (even if I am not an American) and it is not hard to relate to any of them. Madeline, despite being part of this book's title, is not the main protagonist. The POV is that of the narrator, Mac the eldest child of Aaron (Madeline's husband prior to her accident) and Julia. Julia is a nurse who takes care of Madeline after the accident and while Aaron and Julia were looking at the birds outside the hospital, they fall in love and decided to get married after Aaron divorce paper (with Madeline) was approved. Not sure if you could relate to any of them at this point but sure you do with the next. Since the POV is that of the Mac's, the story jumps from that major premise of a beautiful Madeline with a 7-y/o child's brain as Hamilton skillfully diverts her tale to Mac and his relationship to his cousin Buddy from Mac's life as a boy who realizes the family "secret" to his old age and how the people around him, from Madeline, his parents and his cousin Buddy, played a role in his transformation from boy to a middle-age man. The thoughts that played in his mind, even when he is thinking of how to tell his girlfriend about the secret, are carefully crafted as if Hamilton is transcribing the innermost thoughts of a man. His relationship with his cousin Buddy brought back memories of my own cousins. I have many weird cousins mostly from the paternal side: a drug-addict teenager male cousin who left home promising my auntie that he would come back someday once he gets rich; a rebellious sexually-liberated teenager female cousin who brought home a boyfriend and let him sleep on her bed that made my auntie cry outside the door; a grown up male cousin who is now hiding from the police because he and his wife assaulted their neighbors over some money quarrels and an intellectually-challenged male cousin who when he was a college student, got his daily allowance from my auntie but spent months and months inside the moviehouse in Novaliches. My favorite cousin is also from my father's side of the family. We used to fight when we were young boys yet we also had many memories together. One of those was when I was in Grade 5 and we had our summer break in Baguio City (the city in the Philippines constructed on top of the mountain by the Americans), we, together with my brother, walked from our house to Loakan Airport that was situated near the Kennon Road. From dusk to dawn all of us little boys walked from Trancoville St. (near the boundary of Baguio City and La Trinidad) to the airport walking the dangerous sidewalk-less length of the winding Kennon Road with only sticks, jokes, stories with us. I remember we were car-crazy boys then. We looked at each of the passing cars and we used to point which ones we liked and dreamed of having one day. Now I have a Toyota. My brother in San Diego has three cars. My cousin has none as he is living most of his life in ships afloat the oceans all around the world. You see, he is a marine engineer. He only sees cars at the ports they disembark at along their ship routes and when he comes back home to visit his family. If a book can trigger you to think of your yesterdays, it must be good. Hamilton is a brilliant storyteller and I will not think twice reading her other books when opportunities come my way.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-03-17 00:00:00 Luis Mondragon I think this might be the best example I've seen of what people mean when they refer to "women's fiction." This is a book in which, basically, nothing happens. And not even really in the Seinfeld sense where a great deal happens that is internally, or conversationally, noteworthy -- no, nobody in this story changes their heart or mind. Like people do, they get older and think they understand more and they talk deprecatingly about their wives but you can tell they love them a lot, in a very pragmatic way. And that's all. At least one review has dismissed this as a "situation story," as in, that's not a story, it's a situation. But I don't even think it's that. The flicker of Seinfeld absurdity which even the jacket flap takes to be the "situation" of the book -- that the narrator grows up with his father's first wife, who was brain-damaged into childishness early in their marriage, living in the same house as his mother and father and treated by both parents as another child -- is not the main situation. This isn't even one of those (irritating) books where the weird thing that happened in youth goes on to inform and affect everything else, even the most seemingly unrelated experiences. The main situation is, simply, the life and surroundings, feelings and thoughts, people and places, of Mac Maciver, the narrator. The narrative structure of the book is best described as that of a long friendship, close enough to hear intimate thoughts but distant enough for lengthy updates. There isn't really any plot build -- again, not even the back of the book can tell you what HAPPENS in this story. There aren't even any of the wacky scenarios typical of, ahem, chick lit, which is what people probably mostly define women's fiction as these days, the kind of thing that, in theory, you could explain quickly to a nearby man: "And Luke DIDN'T KNOW that Becky had planned this whole other wedding at the same time..." There isn't anything to encapsulate. There is just the whole; there is just what is. Nothing happens... but it's still pretty interesting. Mac Maciver... nice guy. How do I feel about a book like this? How do I feel about calling it feminine? Well, in the words of Teddy KGB of the film Rounders (which my male partner has been known to watch more than once IN A DAY0: "I feel ahkay."