Every Other Weekend

An eight-year-old girl named Nenny with a “natural predilection for alarm” is at the center of Summerfield’s perceptive novel (following Everything Faces All Ways at Once) about growing up in a fractured family at the end of the Cold War. The anxious third-grader lives in Southern California with her brothers, mother, and two stepsiblings at her new stepfather’s house and spends every other weekend with her beat-down dad in his sad apartment. Her mother no longer has time enough to soothe her fears, her stepdad doesn’t relate well to kids, and her new siblings resent the intrusion, so a new Brady Bunch they are not. The episodic story flows along through Nenny’s upbringing and includes vignettes like a family trip to the trailer park to see if Nenny’s stepdad’s ex-wife is safe from her new husband. The author occasionally puts adult thoughts in Nenny’s head, but mostly the girl’s voice is just right and features an authentically childlike logic. Interspersed with the narrative are chapters that spin out Nenny’s various fears and obsessions—home invasions, Gorbachev, whether her stepdad killed people in Vietnam—effectively revealing a sensitive child too young to make sense of her changing world. Summerfield goes overboard foreshadowing a tragedy, deflating the dramatic tension a bit. Nonetheless, the conclusion is unsettling and realistic, and fits the way the story evolves—this slice-of-life story, though not heavy on plot, moves clearly and confidently. (Apr.)