Reviews

People Magazine — August 6, 2002

By Michelle Tauber

If only Oprah hadn't canceled her book club, this debut novel surely would have made her face light up. Like many of Oprah's picks, this baleful, slight (186 page) take explores themes of childhood abuse and self-esteem through the eyes of a female narrator.

Growing up on a Texas farm, 11-year-old Lou Ann Campbell has a cruel, alcoholic mother and a father with a wandering eye. To keep her company, Lou Ann has five dolls—the "children" of the title—each one named after a baby her mother has miscarried. Despite the bleak subject matter, Wyse excels at capturing Lou Ann's hopeful spirit and precocious (but not overly so) voice. "it's true that our family is better than most," she observes. "We have a mother, a daddy and two children: one boy, one girl. We are all smart but not too smart for our own good." Wry and heartfelt, this is a quietly impressive debut. Bottom Line: Open this Box.

O Magazine — July 1, 2002

Sharon Wyse's The Box Children (Riverhead) builds on furtive journal entries made by a young girl growing up in a tough household in north Texas in the 1960s. Lou Ann Campbell hides her writing (and herself) from a sadistic mother and a philandering father. What Lou Ann lacks in being loved, she makes up for with lifesaving imagination ("I can put my eyes just at the top of the wheat and see the whole world stretch out flat to the sky") in this trenchant debut novel that is equal parts heartache and hope.

LA Times — July 7, 2002

The "box children" of Sharon Wyse's assured first novel are five minuscule dolls kept by 12-year-old Lou Ann Campbell, an avid diarist on the verge of adolescence. In her secret daily entries (her mother's rule is "Never write anything down because you never know who will see it"), Lou Ann gives us glimpses of life on a sprawling northern Texas farm during the summer of 1960 while chronicling her family as it threatens to unravel: There's her older brother, with whom she finds herself in a bitter feud; her indulgent father, who has an eye for fast women; and her emotionally wrung-out mother, pregnant again after losing five babies (whose departed souls are represented by Lou Ann's doll collection).

But as The Box Children moves deeper into an unforgiving summer, it zeroes in on Lou Ann's mother, who rules the farm like a commandant while drinking her way through her pregnancy, terrorizes Lou Ann with outrageously overbearing demands and finally tosses her wayward husband out of the house. It seems that only a new RCA Whirlpool refrigerator-freezer can assuage Mrs. Campbell, but who can assuage Lou Ann's disintegrating childhood? Wyse's almanac of a farm summer is an affecting mid-century "Works and Days," a pastoral ode in which the annual harvest, for one Texas girl, reaps much more than wheat.

The Miami Herald — July 21, 2002

By Paula Friedman

Sharon Wyse creates a freshly convincing voice for her 11-year-old narrator, Lou Ann Campbell, in The Box Children. Organized in the form of journal entries, the novel gradually takes on an edgy pathos that will draw and keep readers' sympathy for its heroine, who is trying to keep herself afloat in a troubled family.

Reared on a West Texas wheat farm with her older brother Will, Lou Ann must navigate her way into puberty with little in the way of parental support. Even Will, with whom she had been close throughout her earlier years, seems to abandon her this summer.

Lou Ann speaks with a disarming blend of directness and naiveté, for like most children, she doesn't grasp the depth, or even the nature, of the disturbance that troubles her family: "I will start with this:

"Mother is going to have a baby. She has tried to have babies before, five other ones—I only know about them because one time I asked Mother how come she didn't have more kids. She said she had seven but only my brother and I made it out alive. She said the rest of her babies are ghosts, and I'll be one too someday.''

Lou Ann keeps five of her dolls in a box, safely out of her mother's view, diligently caring for them in an effort to make up for her confusing sense of loss. Sewing clothes for her babies and speaking consolingly to them, Lou Ann desperately wants her mother's current pregnancy to result in a healthy sibling.

But early on, despite her insistence that everything is fine, her mother's belly does not appear to be swelling. Lou Ann accompanies her to doctor visits and even sews her a maternity blouse, willing to do anything to combat her foreboding sense of trouble ahead. When Will and Lou Ann become estranged, she becomes ever more dependent on Loretta, their increasingly unstable mother.

Wyse creates small miracles in revealing, bit by bit, the extent of Loretta's instability. When Lou Ann unintentionally catches sight of one of the married neighbors kissing her father Wayne in the barn, she becomes all the more agitated. Unfortunately, Wayne's out-of-bounds behavior extends beyond a simple kiss, and the young girl soon comes to feel that her home can offer absolutely no haven.

While Wyse seems to be taking up the familiar territory of the dysfunctional family, she manages to avoid the all-too-usual sensationalism of this theme through the individualized voice of her narrator and her method of gradual revelation. She never bombards the reader with gratuitous violence; rather, she intimates with subtlety, allowing small but telling details into the narrative a little at a time.

We discover, for instance, that Lou Ann often takes comfort in the physical world. As her constant attention to her diary demonstrates, she is a budding writer, and in the following passage she comments on the slowing of activity just after harvest:

"It's strange to have things be so still after all the excitement. We are back to our regular days and my brother and Daddy and the hired hands have already started plowing under all the wheat stubble. It makes me sad to see the half-stalks sticking up out there. I think about the roots, how hard they worked all year to hold everything together and draw in whatever the rest of the plant needed to grow. After harvest, roots don't matter at all.''

Given all that we learn she must contend with, we applaud Lou Ann for never abandoning her honesty or her alertness to the dangers inherent in human bonds. We also applaud Wyse, who has created a quietly lovely gem in The Box Children.

Paula Friedman is a writer in Oakland, Calif.

The Record Book Club — December 12, 2002

Wyse has clearly tapped into something that resonates for many readers... [Lou Ann's] Resilience has shown us what it takes for a child to survive: an attachment to nature... A few friends, of whatever kind... [and] a window to a world beyond...

Click here to read the full article (220 k)

Amarillo Globe News — June 16, 2002

Grace, intelligence, and a powerful dark humor characterize a coming-of-age tale that proves children can weather some pretty horrific conditions as long as they have that vital "window to the outside."

Library Journal — July 1, 2002

Using the innocent language of a child's diary, Wyse effectively conveys a tale of horror. This first novel is the story of Lou Ann Campbell and her struggle to turn 12 within a family torn apart by tragedy and the everyday difficulties of Texas farm life. Lou Ann's mother, Loretta, is now pregnant again. Of eight pregnancies, only two have resulted in live children—which is enough to destroy the sanity of any woman. The result for Lou Ann is much mental and verbal abuse—in one memorable scene, her mother decides to teach Lou Ann a lesson by making her wear a tramp outfit and act the part with the hired hands—but the little girl survives by denying the oppression and continuing to dream of her part in the bigger world. Lou Ann responds to the family situation by recreating her lost siblings in the form of five plastic dolls who live in a box, hidden in her closet. These dolls are Lou Ann's only source of companionship, and they help her endure the loneliness. This powerful story of adaptation and survival is recommended for all fiction collections.—Patricia Gulian, South Portland, ME.

Publishers Weekly — June 3, 2002

Taking the form of the diary of a naive 11-year-old girl growing up in 1960s West Texas, this emotionally complex story entertains, frustrates and tugs at the heartstrings. Wyse's simply written tale is alive with the raw honesty and humorously candid observations of farm girl Lou Ann Campbell as she struggles to make sense of her family's ever-increasing dysfunction. Her neurotic mother, who has suffered through five miscarriages, is pregnant again but is still downing beer by the six-pack. Lou Ann's father is no better, carrying his sexual exploits from outside the home into his daughter's bedroom. As the emotional distance between Lou Ann and her older brother, Will, increases by the day, she finds herself with only five small dolls to talk to and the scattered pieces of paper that make up her secret diary to confide in. The dolls, which she keeps in a shoebox and takes out only when she is alone, represent her five unborn siblings, each with its own persona. As her story progresses, Lou Ann finds human friendship with a pen pal from Oklahoma City, one of the older boys hired to help with the wheat harvest, and—to her mother's grave disapproval—the daughter of a Mexican prostitute. Wyse captures the voice of her young protagonist with remarkable skill and naturalness, from her innocent fantasies ("I wish we knew how to do acrobatics together or sing all in harmony so we could go on TV as a big famous family") to her bleakest moments ("My eyes are flat. All they are doing is looking out"). The novel's conclusion can only just be construed as hopeful, but Lou Ann's hardheaded (and hard-won) optimism rings true.

Bookpage — July 1, 2002

By Alice Pelland

In her first novel, Sharon Wyse skilfully creates the diary of Lou Ann Campbell, an 11-year-old growing up on a wheat farm in northern Texas during the summer of 1960. Beginning when the yellow-green wheat is almost ripe and continuing through the harvest and preparation for the next season's planting, Lou Ann writes poignantly about her coming-of-age summer, during which she makes the painful transition from dolls and imaginary play to adolescent concerns such as sexuality and the status of her family in the outside world.

Isolated on a farm a few miles from the Oklahoma border, Lou Ann's only outside contacts are a friend at church, visitors on the Fourth of July and the "wheaties" who come each year to harvest the wheat. Her friends and confidantes are five tiny dolls she keeps hidden in a box, each representing one of her mother's five stillborn children.

Lou Ann has to write in secret and hide her diary carefully each day so her mother won't find it. Clearly, isolation, grief and the unrelenting hard work of the farm have affected Loretta Campbell's abilities as a wife and mother. In a metaphor that describes her family, Lou Ann explains that when termites attack a house, the outside wood can look fine while the inside is being destroyed.

Despite her isolation and her dysfunctional family, Lou Ann possesses a remarkable spark of wisdom and inner strength. She marvels at the smell that comes before a rain and knows that she wants to remember it forever. She savors the nights when there are so many stars in the sky that she could never count them all.

Eventually, the young girl comes to the crucial realization that the past is all we have to prepare ourselves for the future. Most importantly, in this memorable summer, Lou Ann learns what she needs to survive.

Alice Pelland came of age in Texas in the 1960s and writes from Hillsborough, North Carolina.