Sophie’s House of Cards: A Novel by Sharon Oard Warner (review)

In her intimate family novel Sophie’s House of Cards, Sharon Oard Warner employs an omniscient narrator who demands that we work hard to get to the final essence of her narrative. She enriches the novel with several overarching and elaborate metaphors by which we must try to keep track: various Tarot cards that teenager Sophie Granger finds among her mother’s keepsakes introduce each chapter. Sophie’s father, Jack, provides another way to keep track of the several characters who fly in and out of the Granger hive, Jack being a keeper of bees in their yard in Albuquerque: early in the novel Sophie helps him when his queen bee dies and he must replace her, an act that portends later significant events. Sophie’s own situation reflects one final correspondence Warner makes as we wind our way through the novel’s most difficult part: about two-thirds of the way through, Sophie—now seven months pregnant—goes with her best friend Tam to see Juno, a film whose title character is a pregnant teenager.

Describing Sophie’s reaction to Juno, the narrator tells us that “She is transfixed, so engaged by Juno and her nearly- identical dilemma to Sophie’s own that she loses herself in the story” (212). We learn that Juno’s story inspires Sophie to begin planning for her own baby’s future. Then the omniscient narrator reveals something important about Sophie’s future that Sophie herself cannot yet know: “A few years from now, [Sophie] will explain to Candace [her baby’s eventual adoptive mother] how she made her decision” (212). Until the narrator confides in us at this point, we have been unsure of where our sympathies or allegiances ought to lie in the novel. That we learn something beyond what the characters know becomes a significant act of trust between readers and Warner’s narrator, providing us with a clarity we need to appreciate the lives about which we have been reading. The constantly moving swarm of characters and the complicated, sometimes contradictory behaviors we experience feel real, and our struggle to understand the confusion becomes our salvation. Like all the screwed-up, confused characters we’ve met, after the Juno sequence the narrator gradually prods us to focus clearly on Sophie, the most compelling of all the characters.

Through earlier chapters, we almost understand how and why most of the characters behave the way they do—but that isn’t always easy. They have indeed flown in and out of our view like bees around a hive, perhaps causing difficulty keeping track. Sophie’s retro-hippie mother, Peggy, hides secrets, lives deep within herself, and enjoys a distinctly unstable relationship with her husband, Jack. Jack has his own worries: an aging mother in a nursing home back East and ongoing money woes. Sophie’s boyfriend, Will, a confused seventeen-year-old boy, cannot help but freak out over Sophie’s pregnancy, while his own mother, Laurel, moves into the narrative to help Sophie. Sophie’s younger brother, Ian, comes and goes through all of this drama and trauma. And then Candace, Peggy’s old friend from commune days, flies in from Boston.

Like a tarot card reader, the narrator projects a future for us after Juno, and we begin to understand that Warner’s many metaphorical structures really serve to prepare us for one very particular story here, one that we deserve to know before the other characters do. We recognize Sophie’s transformation from careless and carefree teenager in the flurry of the novel’s beginning to an especially thoughtful young woman by the end. Her profile of teenage courage in the face of unplanned pregnancy stands out in relief—Sophie indeed becomes the queen bee— by the final chapters. Indeed, Warner has structured this complicated story not just as a busy hive full of characters who fly into and away from each other, nor as a flimsy house...