Jane Hamilton blends dark comedy and high drama in her marvelous eighth novel, The Phoebe Variations. The story is narrated by a woman in her 60s, reflecting on her younger self's eagerness to shed her old life and the pivotal events that spectacularly derailed her senior year of high school.
When readers meet 17-year-old Phoebe in 1974, she is a piano prodigy who is "in love with several of the dead composers." She lives with her adoptive mother, Greta, outside Chicago. Hamilton (A Map of the World) has a remarkable gift for capturing her characters' quirky sensibilities. In Phoebe, she has crafted a spirited, witty teenager with fragile edges who identifies deeply with Jane from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Phoebe and her best friend, Luna, form an unlikely duo, since Luna's tennis-club vibe clashes with Phoebe's slightly feral tendencies. But their connection is "intergalactic," seemingly destined to last forever.
As graduation looms, Greta insists Phoebe visit the Dahlgrens, her biological family in Wisconsin. The encounter destabilizes Phoebe and sends her into a tailspin of entertaining misadventures from which no one in her orbit emerges unscathed. She searches for something she cannot yet articulate, and readers witness the "moment... where the good student starts to go down to the dark dogs" as Phoebe launches herself chaotically into the future.
Phoebe's yearnings--to fall in love, to perform as a concert pianist, to finally live--clash with her youthful reality, but fate inevitably delivers her exactly where she needed to be all along. The Phoebe Variations is an enchanting novel from an expert storyteller. --Shahina Piyarali