The Hill
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Clark blends vivid Kafkaesque motifs with a whimsical coming-of-age narrative in her beautiful debut. Suzanna, the narrator, was raised by her grandparents in New York City. Now a young woman, she recounts how she spent her early childhood regularly visiting a hilltop prison outside the city where her mother was serving a life sentence for her role in a bank robbery that resulted in the killing of a guard. The mother, a former revolutionary, is a cause célèbre, but as a child Suzanna doesn't understand the details. Her grandfather, with whom she visits the prison, describes the crime as a "misguided attempt... to steal from the rich and give to the poor." He dies when Suzanna is nine, and her unyielding grandmother, disgusted by and ashamed of her daughter, refuses to take Suzanna to the prison or read her daughter's letters, even as her own health deteriorates. A sympathetic nun from the prison arranges for Suzanna's regular visits, and as she grows up, she begins to question what she wants for herself. Vexed by her push-pull relationship with her mother, she wonders if she's continued visiting the prison only at the nun's insistence, and senses that her grandmother, who pressures her into skipping the seventh grade, is impatient for her to become the successful young woman she'd wanted her daughter to be ("Everywhere I turned in my seventeenth year someone was saying, Go"). It's a tour de force.
