BOOKS: The Center of Everything

"Thoroughly readable and engaging..."

The Center of Everything
by Laura Moriarty
(Hyperion, 2003)

Trade Paperback, 291 pgs, $14.00 U.S.

Do you remember what life was like when you were twelve? The age when it seemed as if we were the center of everything, and everything affected us so personally: school, friends, family, world events, LIFE. Twelve is really the beginning of the end of thinking that way, growing up and figuring out the center of everything really depends on which map you are looking at.

Evelyn Bucknow is the main character in Laura Moriarty's poignant, coming-of-age novel, The Center of Everything, set in rural Kansas, which, on Evelyn's map, is smack dab the middle of the universe.

The Center of Everything is a time capsule of a book for those of us who grew up and came of age in the 80s. We meet Evelyn at the age of 10, watching Ronald Reagan on television, "giving a speech because he wants to be president." Through her sweet, confused, precocious, naive young voice, we follow Evelyn along in her life through high school, catching glimpses of national and international events of the times, carried along by an adolescent preoccupied with her own issues (Mean Girls, friendship, first love & heartbreak, school & social issues), occasionally tuning in to the larger world on TV or in conversation.

It's a narrative that works, and maybe it's nostalgia that makes Evelyn and The Center of Everything so thoroughly readable and engaging. I also loved the quirky, eccentric, deeply-flawed, yet highly-relatable characters: Evelyn; her mother, Tina; and her grandmother, Eileen.

Evelyn comes of age with several challenges and disadvantages, a witness and victim to all the bad decisions that made up her life, over which she had no control: an unwed, mentally unstable mother; a severely disabled baby brother, the result of Tina's affair with an older, married man, who abandons them; living in a small apartment, on welfare, on the bare edge of anything. Evelyn sees the generational impact of these disadvantages all around her and worries that she is doomed to repeat her mother's mistakes. Her best friends (Travis & Deena) drop out of high school to get married because of an unplanned pregnancy.

Evelyn matures through The Center of Everything, and sets herself to rise above the circumstances of her birth, to escape the welfare life and get to college.

If there is one disappointment in this book, it is at the end, which comes much too quickly, and very abruptly, as Evelyn prepares to leave for college.

Anna Quindlen blurbs on the front cover: "Authentic and intelligent...One of those novels that makes you feel sad when it's over."

Mainly because it was such an abrupt ending, tearing us away from characters we have grown to care about. There are not many happily-ever-afters in The Center of Everything, but at least we have hope for Evelyn.

The Center of Everything is evocative of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, an extraordinary, hard-scrabble, coming-of-age story (memoir) -- another one to put on your list with The Center of Everything.