In The Big Door Prize, M.O. Walsh (My Sunshine Away) crafts a surprising and heartwarming contemporary drama about looking back and looking forward. A machine, DNAMIX, shows up in a small Louisiana town to reveal "your potential in life, what your body and mind are capable of doing."
Cherilyn's DNAMIX readout is "Royalty," and she immediately believes the machine sees beyond her housewife exterior. Her husband, Douglas, for his part, is reluctant to use the machine but acknowledges that he, too, has "hit a wall in his life" and that it's time to "make big-picture changes." Juxtaposed with adult angst is a sympathetic portrait of the prospects for contemporary teenagers in a world not of their making. Jacob, a high-schooler, grapples with life after the accidental death of his popular twin brother, Toby, and is drawn into a plot that creates unexpected suspense involving the entire town.
The adults in this story have been unwilling and unused to contemplating their life choices, and their discomfort, by turns funny and melancholy, will be familiar to many readers. Walsh's suggestion that teenagers, closely watching the adults around them, have a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of the compromises they'll make as adults is often painfully accurate. Because each "choice we make today is an extension of, and an opportunity arisen from, the choices we have previously made and will make in the future," readers of this singular, nuanced story will, quite possibly and without a machine as prompt, undertake their own personal reflection. --Cindy Pauldine, bookseller, the river's end bookstore, Oswego, N.Y.