BRIGHT ANGEL TIME by Martha McPhee

Finished Sa 11/6/21

The title refers to layers of rock that record the earth's age. Eight year old Kate's (the novel's protagonist) father is a geologist and she wants to see the Grand Canyon and learn the secrets of the layers of rock that reveal thousdands of years of history. 

The novel is set in America in 1970. The geologist has left the family and mom has taken up with a hippie hustler named Anton. They travel from New Jersey across the country to California. Kate is the youngest and she has two older sisters, Jane and Julia.

Dad leaves the family on July 10, 1969. This is the day that American astronauts walked on the moon for the first time.

According to what I wrote on the flyleaf I purchased the book after a motorcycle ride on the VT 1100 to The Old Book Barn in Forsyth, Il on Su 8/10/03. There is no indication that I finished the book.

It's the first novel by Martha McPhee and she's gone on to create a following because she's a great writer.

The novel is a chronicle of their lives as seen through the eyes of eight year old Kate.

Some of what happens to her is pretty tragic, but it doesn't register because she's so young.

There's a possible rape scene involving Anton that's skimmed over and Kate's dropping acid isn't given the attention that it probably deserves. I guess an eight year old doesn't really have the depth to understand what is happening.

When the family was together the girls all wore matching outfits that were handmade by Eve, Kate's mother. Eve ironed the family's underware- very anal-retentive.  

From Goodreads:

"Set in the early 1970s, Bright Angel Time is a dazzling first novel about eight-year-old Kate and her two sisters, whose lives are turned upside down when their mother falls in love with Anton, a mysterious, seductive therapist with five children of his own.

'One of the most shocking and powerful books about childhood I've ever read. There is a whole generation of people waiting for this particular story to be told.'"

Someone wrote the following at Goodreads:

"Some folks should not have kids because they haven't grown up themselves, and when they do, it's a miracle any resulting children survive. The book may be set in the 70s, but some things never change!"

The Kirkus review:

"Yet another coming-of-age debut novel, this one dragging on a bit as it evokes the '60s-style wanderings of a divorced housewife and her three unhappy daughters. Until 1969, eight-year-old Kate lived in perfect contentment in a white house in rural New Jersey with her two older sisters, her geologist father, and her beautiful blond mother, a housewife named Eve. Unfortunately, that was the year that Dad elected to run off with his lover, and Eve, after a depression that kept her in bed for months, fell in love with an itinerant Gestalt therapist named Anton and allowed him to uproot their lives. Yearning to experience life truly in a way her anal-retentive husband never had, Eve follows Anton to the Esalen center in California. The couple gather up Eve's three well-brought-up daughters, put them in a camper with Anton's five hippie kids, and take off for a tour of the American West. The new, extended family wanders aimlessly through deserts and semi-abandoned towns, sneaking into unoccupied motel rooms for showers, dropping in on Indian settlements and millionaires' resorts, and absorbing various hitchhikers into their fold, while the children bicker and the adults preach free love along the way. Meanwhile, Kate tries to accustom herself to the loss of her father and happy former life, working hard (but often failing) to see the good in Anton's motherless children and to forgive her own newly liberated mom. Eve's reckless devotion to Anton has its consequences—one daughter becomes deathly ill, another runs away, and Kate herself becomes a religious fanatic for a while—and yet Eve's decision to return home at last seems motivated more by fatigue than by lessons learned, and it's unclear who, if anyone, has really come of age. McPhee's story holds interest, but much like its protagonists, it tends to wander without direction, in the end failing to provide much of a catharsis."

I really liked the book and I will read more by Martha McPhee