Dakota Fruit
- 102 pages
- 4 hours of reading
The narrator of Dakota Fruit is coming of age endowed with music, art, and a broad worldview, yet ignorant of the calamity that has pushed her family to the rural West. Sensing her parents' displacement, she seeks solace and beauty by skating on thin river ice "where a girl disappeared," and gazing at images of Venus and Mary in Renaissance art books. Words and imagery reflect the daughter's longing to pierce her father's emotional remoteness. Poems in the mother's voice reveal the cost of the father's politics and his devastation at having a disabled son. McCarthyism and child autism threaten the bonds and tenacity of this American family during the 1950s.
