“I think the baby hates me,” she says just days after giving birth to her first child, a daughter named Violet. Blythe is primed, perhaps even genetically programmed, for maternal struggle. Her grandmother, also abusive, departed in a more gruesome way: by hanging herself from a tree in the front yard. Her own mother abandoned her when she was 11, after years of cruelty. Does the preschooler with a predilection for hitting need a professional intervention, or maybe just a taekwondo class? Is the kid who drops naps but not tantrums a future rageaholic? This sort of hand-wringing, at its most extreme, is at the center of Ashley Audrain’s taut, chilling debut novel, “The Push.”īlythe Connor is reluctant to become a parent - understandably so. Is my child’s behavior normal? It’s a parenting question for the ages, particularly at a time when a certain type of parent (present company included) frets over every childhood quirk, no matter how mundane.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |