cover image Family Blood

Family Blood

Mary Hazzard. Ariadne Press (MD), $21.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-918056-10-8

An absorbing portrait of an American family takes shape against the backdrop of WWII in this tale of stifling '40s mores. Robert Davenant is a conservationist and scientist in a Michigan university town, a conscientious but emotionally restrained and often cold father and husband. His wife, Grace, earned her Ph.D. in anthropology but relinquished dreams of a career when she married, raising five demanding children while writing a euphemistic weekly newspaper column on the ""joys"" of her large family. Robert's own frustrations--he too is overwhelmed by his many offspring--surface time and again in barely concealed contempt for his wife and harsh treatment of the children. Clara Jane, their precocious oldest daughter and the novel's primary narrator, picks up on all of her parents' anxieties, though on the surface her childhood seems idyllic: she reads, rides her bicycle and writes plays for her siblings to perform. Grace's efforts to successfully maintain the illusion of a large happy family are meticulously and convincingly described. The strain begins to show when Robert's obsessive spinster sister, Mildred, moves in, and intensifies when Grace finds work on a science quarterly and meets editor Malcolm Wolfe, with whom she begins an affair. The tensions finally culminate in Grace's mysterious, violent death. It is only 40 years later, in the novel's last third and after her father's death, that Clara Jane finally decides for herself what probably happened. Though its themes are somewhat dated, the novel neatly conveys the disparity between surface lives and the far more complex reality just beneath, particularly poignant against the background of the country's own awakening after WWII. (Oct.)