Semiprecious (review)

Garnet's mother has always claimed that Garnet and her sister Opal are her "precious gems," but then she dumps the girls on her sister's rickety porch in a backwater town in Oklahoma while she goes to Nashville to pursue dreams of country music stardom. Here Garnet learns that she is at best semiprecious to a woman whose selfishness seems unfathomable. When Daddy is injured in a fire on his oil rig, Garnet is sure her mother will come get them and take them home, but no dice. Finally fed up with living on lies and welfare while awaiting Daddy's disability checks, Garnet tracks her mother down in Music City, only to find that she has been hijacking the checks to finance her own failure; formerly meek Aunt Julia then blows into town after her wayward niece, puts Mama in her place, and takes Garnet and her sister back home to Oklahoma. Set in 1960, Garnet's story is infused with a compelling realism in a time of nascent social change. Her salvation from collapsing under the weight of her mother's betrayal comes in the form of a radical art teacher who shares with her the idea that art, which is Garnet's passion, can be a vehicle for irony, which is just what she needs as she tries to sort through her feelings about her situation. Though she doesn't use her art to convey any complex metaphor about the rest of her life, Garnet clearly develops an adult vision about the world that includes an understanding of truth behind appearances and the necessary compromises and ambiguities that comprise a life. Love's only misstep in this down-home coming-of-age story is Garnet's rather unbelievable appreciation for her mother's teaching her that following your dreams is important no matter what the cost, but there is enough irony and contradiction in the insistence that other people are the ones paying that cost to mitigate this unfortunate warm fuzzy. An author's note commenting on the artists that inspire Garnet follows the text.