"Some Things That Stay" includes desire to belong

"Some Things That Stay"

Sarah Willis, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $24

"Some things that stay there be

Grief, hills, eternity ..."

Borrowing from a nugget of an idea in an Emily Dickinson poem, first-time author Sarah Willis crafts a poignant, honest picture of a young girl's odyssey into adulthood.

Tamara Anderson is 15, has never lived in one place for longer than it takes her father to paint the local landscape, and yearns for both family stability and a real home.

Her father is an artist, her mother an unorthodox woman ahead of her time for the 1950s. So when her parents move her and her two younger siblings to rural Mayville, N.Y. - and despite the fact she has to sleep in the bed of a boy who died - she decides she's never moving again.

She tries to make friends with the kids who live in the tar- papered house across the road, goes to church against her parents' wishes (they're atheists, and proud of it), and explores her sexual awakening with a young man she meets.

When her mother becomes desperately ill and is hospitalized and her father goes to New York for an art exhibit that includes his work, Tamara begins making some decisions about her future.

Oh, the neighbors take care of the Anderson children as best they can - without a great deal of cooperation from Tamara, who is seething with anger at both her parents.

Tamara drags herself, occasionally kicking and sometimes screaming, into adulthood. And, in the end, she may get her way through sheer determination.

Although some things are left unresolved - will her mother recover or die? - the reader is left knowing that Tamara is a strong young woman who can withstand whatever life throws at her. And that, if we really want it, finding a home is not so much a circumstance as a decision.

Copyright 2000
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