About the Author

Anna Quindlen is the author of many bestselling books, including the #1 New York Times bestselling novel Rise and Shine, the #1 bestselling memoir Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, and A Short Guide to a Happy Life. Her other novels include Blessings, One True Thing, the Oprah Book Club Selection Black and Blue, and Still Life with Bread Crumbs.

Reviews

“Set in the 1960s, Object Lessons concerns three generations of a rich Irish clan who live in an established inner suburb of New York City. . . . The patriarch, John Scanlan, is a lively figure. . . . One of [his sons], Tom, rebels by marrying a handsome, lower-class Italian girl. It is their daughter Maggie who is trying desperately to master some object lessons. . . . Quindlen is at her best writing about the dislocations of growing up, the blows a child does not see coming.”—Time
 
“Anna Quindlen’s first novel is about an experience that is the same for everyone and different for us all: the time when we suddenly see our family with an outsider’s eye and begin the separation that marks our growing up. . . . Quindlen knows that all the things we ever will be can be found in some forgotten fragment of family.”—The Washington Post Book World

“A delicate, finely cut jewel of a story . . . Anna Quindlen’s story of Maggie Scanlan’s twelfth year in a Westchester County suburb next to the Bronx is a charming, compassionate little masterpiece—a story so compelling that one wishes at the end that it hadn’t stopped and that one could learn more about Maggie, who, although she doesn’t realize it, is a magic child on the way to being a magic woman. . . . No man could have possibly spun this strong yet gossamer story of what happens to a child when all the clear boundaries of her existence collapse in a single month. . . . It’s a fine novel, a brilliant novel, a story that makes one wait eagerly for Anna Quindlen’s next novel.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
“Warm and wry . . . Accessible, thoughtful . . . The novel has a quaint, old-fashioned feel. Decisions made early in life are irrevocable; unplanned pregnancy seals a couple’s fate. It isn’t lure of freedom that pulls Maggie Scanlan, the thirteen-year-old protagonist, but the familiar bonds of her life, the lines drawn ‘in her house, her neighborhood, her relationships. . . .’ During the summer that the novel chronicles, all these lines are blurred, shifted, or destroyed.” —San Francisco Chronicle “The characters are quirky and vividly drawn. . . . The writing is lovely, and shows the humor and quiet insight that made Quindlen’s column beloved. . . . Quindlen is an intelligent and imaginative writer.”—The Boston Globe

“Rich in the precisely observed . . . With a quiet, sure touch, Quindlen carefully fits together the narrative pieces of individual desires, doubts, and development to create a satisfyingly complex mosaic of communal growth and change. There are dramatic events—a death, a fire, a wedding—but the more important activity of this novel takes place within its characters, as they pursue self-knowledge and closer connections with those they love.”—Newsday

YA-- This first novel is an insightful family chronicle, an informed commentary on the '60s, and the coming-of-age depiction of a mother and daughter. As 13-year-old Maggie struggles with her identity within the boisterous Scanlan clan, her mother also finds her own place within the patriarchal family that has never accepted her. Both women experience rites of passage during the fateful summer that a housing development is being built behind their home, infringing on their emotional and physical spaces. A fast-paced plot involves small fires set in the development by Maggie's friends and romantic tension between her mother and a man from her past. Readers will appreciate Maggie's dilemmas as she grapples with peer pressure and sexual bewilderment, and as she begins to understand her mother, whose discontent oddly parallels her own. --Jackie Gropman, Richard Byrd Library, Springfield, VA-

This first novel by former New York Times columnist, and now syndicated columnist, Quindlen is a well-written but not particularly engaging reflection on growing up. Maggie Scanlan, product of an Irish father and an Italian mother, lives in a New York City suburb in the 1960s. We follow her through her 12th summer, as she endures the trials and tribulations of the transition to adolescence. Maggie is not particularly insightful, though, and none of the other characters give her much insight into growing up. The characters themselves are not as lively as they might be, and the plot is standard: marriage problems, family quarrels, a problem pregnancy. Libraries may get requests for this from readers familiar with Quindlen's nonfiction. Literary Guild alternate; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/90.-- Gwen Gregory, U.S. Courts Lib., Phoenix, Ariz.