Waiting for the Other Shoe
I’ve just finished reviewing an English novel by the name of Waiting for the Other Shoe. In her first novel, Maggie Handsley weaves a story around a young child with undiagnosed reactive attachment disorder, the result being a wonderfully constructed story of the people who tried to love this girl, and the devastation she caused. It’s not so much a story about reactive attachment disorder as it is one of the people involved. I was very much impressed with it, as you can see from my review of it for the RadKid.Org site.
– ken
February 13th, 2009 at 3:25 am
I too enjoyed Waiting for the Other Shoe, at least its first chapter. There were definitely red flags. I thought the father, David, was really well written. And it made me think about the stuff that you need for a baby – that scene was really well done, about the baby knives and forks and spoons.
The biggest thing which struck me was the mother’s lack of identity and the way she chose to compensate for this in an adaptive/defensive way, and how this taps into roots of British culture, especially as children and those overseas may experience it. A kind of literary imperalism!
Yet this family: Annie, Bethany (what a lovely Christian name by the way: a few social services have it as far as I know) and David … I found it interesting that they were both teachers, and it was good that they skipped work (I am looking for the proper words to say what they did) when they found that their daughter was not ‘normal’.
And the whole ‘all you need is love message’ touched on a great deal of irony for me – and PAIN and ambivalence. I imagine this will happen to many people who read this blog with any degree of regularity.
When you say ‘one of the people involved’ it implies, only one person. It’s hard to put those prepositions where they should be. Some of the spellings in the book were dialect spellings, though I was not clear whether it should have been ‘previous’ or ‘precious’, when Annie was narrating in her head about how David would think her ’silly’ (my word) for wanting to love her daughter with an instant love.
If the book was being set now, Bethany would be an adult. Was she an infant or an older child adoption – they were not overly clear of her age, and her developmental characteristics gave me no further clue.
Postscript: The link is about how the British elite are scared of babies.
February 14th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
No, I don’t believe her age at the time of adoption was given, but Annie did pick her up and hold her the first time they met, giving the idea that she was still a baby. You’ve added some very good comments to the story, by the way. It really was such a well written book, the kind you think about after you’ve finished it.
February 17th, 2009 at 12:04 am
I was able to re-read the book on Google Books, and I remembered that on page 8, Bethany was ‘going on for eighteen months’, and had a lot of ‘baby sick’ as they put it. Of course she could have been adopted a few months or a year later, because they allow fostering options.
Page 21 is the big turning point for me. The bit about where she ‘likes to be with people’ … but at the start of Chapter 2, which I didn’t read all that carefully … Bethany has these ‘persnickety habits’ and Annie is trying to make her aware of the daffodils.
One important thing about the early chapters and later on is getting into a routine. This is a part we take for granted in typical parenthood. I like the part about the mother and toddler group: Annie gets very very involved in it. And how her point of view changes from when she was a teacher to a mother. I like the way she handed out mugs and got to know people on the side. I think there might have been a lesbian relationship there or some other informal arrangement.
It was great (!) to see Bethany recognised as the ‘brightest toddler there’. Then David asks: Did she come out of herself? And Bethany is all right with other people: like Maura. About page 80 or something I was thinking most definitely the inhibited RAD, and that manifestation has clues to her causation. (it was definitely before Page 80 though!)
I was able to read quite a bit about Summer 1995, when she was in the second year of primary school, and how when she was five she was this little girl who ‘didn’t speak’.
The community feeling that Annie refers to is very important, especially in the villages, and when she helps in Moira’s shop.