44. Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking

Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking (Aoibheann Sweeney, 2007)

My daily NYT habit has led me to a lot of good books this year. I read this review and immediately requested AOTITUS. That title is way to long for me to keep typing out. I have a weakness for first novels, even though a good one inevitably leaves me waiting years for the author's next attempt. So maddening.

This one's about Miranda, a kind of weird, lonely girl who lives on a tiny Maine island with her father, who's translating Ovid's Metamorphoses. Her mother died when Miranda was three, in what could have been an accident or might have been a suicide. Ovid's stories are woven into Miranda's in a wonderfully natural way. Miranda's father is withdrawn and interested only in his work and she's actually being raised by Mr. Blackwell, a mysterious friend of her father's. When Miranda graduates from high school, her father sends her to New York City to work at a library he founded years before. There, she meets people from her father's past and starts to realize the truth behind the her parents' mysterious past and how they ended up in Maine.

Coming of age stories can be painful and trite, but this one is lovely. I liked that the novel was separated into three sections (The Age of Silver, The Age of Bronze, and the Age of Steel), each named for parts of the origin of the world according to Book One of Metamorphoses, and each of which represents a different part of Miranda's story. It's clever without knocking you over the head. Sweeney has a real gift for language that's both spare and descriptive, and her facility with allusion is really amazing. I usually don't like books that use one source so extensively, maybe because I haven't read enough of the canon to be familiar with most of what's used, but this time it worked for me. Maybe that's because I've read Ovid more than once, and am pretty familiar with Greek mythology in general. But the book is definitely good, and through Miranda, Sweeney sneaks in enough explanation and interpretation that you don't even need to know the stories before coming to this book.