Four Corners

"I was ten the summer we drove my mother crazy." And so starts this captivating debut novel, narrated by ten-year-old Rainey Dougherty. It's August 1953 in Four Corners, New York, when Rainey's mother is hospitalized for mental instability--or, as Rainey's father puts it, when the doctors say she needs a good long rest. Rainey and her four siblings find themselves at the mercy of Merle, their caustically funny and bitter aunt who comes up to the country from the Bronx--with her troubled fourteen-year-old daughter, Joan--to take care of that "goddamn bunch of nuts" she knows these children are. This starts a summer of enlightenment for Rainey when she learns about the realities of life through the eyes of innocence. And, though it seems strange at first, Merle's voice is the one clear note in Rainey's head as she begins a season without her mother, a season that brings both the young girls to the brink of disaster, again and again. For Rainey, it is a season that is often harrowing, sometimes hilarious, but always hopeful.