Kerr, M.E. (2006). Your Eyes in Stars. NY: Harper Collins. ISBN: 0060756829. 240 pages.
One of the things I love about M.E. Kerr is her refusal to offer pat answers or explanations for all of her characters' behaviors; she is at her best with "slice of life" fiction and she imbues her descriptions of what might at first seem like suburban normalcy with a slight tension. In a Kerr novel, gift horses aren't often looked at in mouths and what passes for normalcy or even extraordinariness is often revealed as corruption. With Your Eyes in Stars, I really thought that I was getting an historical fiction slice-of-life; set in the late 1930s, this novel is the story of Jessie, who feels as if her world brightens when she meets her new beautiful, sophisticated and German immigrant neighbor, Elisa. Jessie's mother is convinced the new family is the 1930s version of Eurotrash and that Jessie's friendship with Elisa is nothing but a trifle to the German girl; when Elisa's family suddenly moves back to Europe, the girls' friendship deepens through letters. The beginning of the story--when Elisa is Stateside--was awesome: working class families with upper class aspirations, influences of the Depression, subtle details of history. When Elisa goes back to Germany and WWII begins, the whole thing turns into sort of a WWII Issue Novel as Elisa reports the growing difficulties in Deutschland and eventually seems to disappear. Of course, I kind of knew it was going to happen; you can't set a novel in the 30s and include a German character without making reference to European difficulties. However, I think the story would have been more powerful if Elisa and her family had stuck around and Kerr had been free to gradually let the dark news of Germany sneak in like an evil mist and, as they impact the townspeople's views of Elisa's family, allow Jessie to struggle with a type of social war on her own turf. Oh, well. |
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