{ "item_title" : "The Hill", "item_author" : [" Harriet Clark "], "item_description" : "After her mother is sentenced to life in a hilltop prison, Suzanna vows to return to the hill forever. An unexpectedly funny and deeply moving novel about the many ways we punish and return to each other.Suzanna Klein was a baby when her mother got up early one morning to rob a bank with a group of fellow radicals. Now, every Saturday, Suzanna lines up at the prison gates among the other children, each dressed as if for celebration. Inside there is a nursery and a cemetery; there are watchful guards and distractable nuns; there are women counting down to release and women like Suzanna's mother, who will never be released. At home, Suzanna is raised by her grandmother, who is entirely unforgiving of her daughter's crime and refuses to visit the prison. Surrounding Suzanna are her grandmother's friends, who know one another from their years in the Communist Party and still spend extended cocktail hours debating the Hitler-Stalin pact. Though these women once insisted on changing the world, they are torn between teaching Suzanna how the world works and shielding her from it. Suzanna vows to return to the prison forever but her mother wants her to be free. Harriet Clark's The Hill is an incandescent novel of a child growing up between worlds, the last of three generations whose fates have been tied to punishment. It is the tale of a family broken apart by the desire for change, told with irreverent wisdom and visionary force. The Hill brings new music to American fiction.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/37/461/454/0374614547_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "28.00", "online_price" : "28.00", "our_price" : "28.00", "club_price" : "28.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "28.00" } }

Overview

Customers Also Bought

Details

Obstacles both literal and figurative are at the heart of The Hill, an uncommonly empathetic debut novel by Harriet Clark. This story of a decade in the life of a young woman growing up with a mother in prison adds welcome complexity to traditional narratives about maternal relationships and shows the damage that incarceration can wreak upon a family.

The young woman is Suzanna, brought up by her grandparents in New York City since her mother’s sentence began. When Suzanna was a baby, her mother and a dozen other political radicals, all of them women, attempted to rob a bank. As Suzanna’s grandfather explains, that scheme was “carefully planned” but “dismally executed” and went so “grievously awry” that a bank guard was killed.

Hillcrest, the aptly named prison where her mother is interned, sits atop a steep hill. For Suzanna’s first eight years, her grandfather would bring her there to visit her mother. But when her grandfather dies, Suzanna’s grandmother, an unforgiving woman who tells her granddaughter “The only good thing your mother ever did for you is make sure you have no father,” refuses to visit the prison or take Suzanna.

Suzanna’s grandmother is a marvelously brittle character, a rebel who thinks Suzanna doesn’t need school, saying, “Without school we can do whatever we want.” She also has a rich political past: She and other women in her circle were Communist Party members. She even once pretended to be a Nazi so that she could infiltrate Nazi events. As the novel progresses and Suzanna ages into her late teens, readers see her slow maturation as she learns more about her family’s legacy.

The Hill is a clear-eyed portrait of punishment and grudges, the costs of political fervor and the difficulty of reconciliation. As this wise debut makes poignantly clear, some hills are tough to climb.