Family Blood: A Novel

By Olivia Dwight and Mary Hazzard

The story of the Davenants, a middle class family whose lives are irrevocably changed when an obsessive maiden aunt comes to live with them, upsetting the delicate balance that has kept them all from... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0918056101
• ISBN13: 9780918056108
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Ariadne Pr
• Length: 231 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.0" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

Why isn't this author a best seller?

Why isn't this author a best seller? She's certainly a best writer. Her people, with their entirely original characteristics, behave in unusual but believable ways, and her delicate touch, her subtle wit, her surprising story all gripped me long after I was supposed to be asleep. There's important sex and a shocking death and a lingering mystery. This book has everything.

A deft, suspense-driven story. Read it; you'll like it.

Mary Hazzard's highly readable novel FAMILY BLOOD is also good American history. A time capsule of the Michigan home front in World War II, it comes complete with Betty Grable, food rationing, and a child's nightmares of Nazi bombers. Read it; you'll enjoy it.Two Ph.D.s, Grace and Robert Davenant, raise--on his inadequate prewar academic salary--the five children Grace has presented Robert with despite the couple's frantic attempts at birth control. This dysfunctional couple is about as worldly as a pair of bunny slippers.But the bunny slippers belong to Mildred, Robert's destructive older sister, who moves in with them and begins to take over Grace's position in the household.Ever since the sixth-grade recess when Robert hit Grace with a snowball, she has worshipped him. And he lets her. This is not easy for anyone to live with. The Davenants--educated, conscientious, and desperately well-intentioned--manage nevertheless to abuse their children. Mostly mentally.But not exclusively. Their father canes them (for their own good), and the oldest, Clara Jane, suffers one more school embarrassment when her outgrown hand-me-down skirt (before girls wore slacks) won't hide the bruises on her legs.The most telling and humorous parts of the book are seen through Clara Jane's sharp eyes. Her parents, she can see, mostly let the children raise themselves.This really means that it's Clara Jane who is raising them. She is a responsible surrogate, despite her unceasing fears. She fears her own temper, her father's furies, her nightmares, and the humiliations that school and the outside world hold for those who live in genteel poverty.We first meet her, almost thirteen, some months before Pearl Harbor and the United States entry into World War II. Two years will pass before this national event is echoed by an internal family one.Hazzard tells the Davenants' story with a keen sense of reality driving her narrative to its completely satisfying end. I got so wrapped up in this family's life that I was surprised when the bloodshed foretold on page one did erupt. I had literally forgotten it was coming. And the story, moving along fast to this point, picks up even more speed after the night of the gunshot that changes their lives forever.Read it; you'll like it. It's one you won't forget.

A satisfying work by a gifted writer

Call this novel an "anti-blockbuster." Mary Hazzard has eschewed all the demands and conventions of cheap fiction. No international intrigue here, no sultans or princesses or jet-setting fashion models, no gratuitous sex, violence or other throwaway titillation. Instead, Hazzard has taken a handful of rather ordinary lives and split them wide open, revealing their complexity and contradictions and ultimately their human richness. The Davenant parents, both of them Ph.D.s, are well-meaning yet deeply conflicted, and their periodic dysfunction spills into the life of their eldest daughter, who is just entering the emotional trial of adolescence. Despite its title (and the death that serves as the story's fulcrum), "Family Blood" is often gently humorous and genuinely touching. Like most of us, the novel's characters present faces to the world that are not fully true. Hazzard peels away these facades leaf by leaf. The story of the Davenants may or may not look like your own, but it is guaranteed to touch a chord in the serious reader. In this era of TV confessions, it's a reminder of the depth and power of print.