Xceptional. Berne's convincing, reflective debut impresses on many levels. The narrator, now in her 30s, candidly recalls the world of her 10-year-old self at the exact moment normality was cast aside forever; when a young boy was raped and murdered mere feet from safety, when her "suburban father burdened with the heart of a Russian hero without any sort of balancing grand intellect or ironic world view" ran away with her aunt, leaving her mother and her other aunts in a state of defiance and when Watergate proved both a national TV distraction and a continuance of the evil begun with Kennedy's killing and Vietnam. At the heart of it all is young Marsha whose belief in everything has been shattered and she selects a scapegoat. Intelligent, honest and quite simply, immensely superior to about 95 per cent of the fiction currently published anywhere.
Read it.
