Harmony by Carolyn Parkhurst (review)

Carolyn Parkhurst's latest novel, Harmony, is a tightly-written, suspenseful story about the lengths to which parents will go to support their children. Beneath the dramatic plot, Parkhurst weaves a compelling inner narrative about families who have children with special needs. The novel's narrative restraint leaves readers eager to keep reading while its emotional undertones push them to reconsider their perceptions of ability.

The story is centered on Camp Harmony, where the Hammond family have just moved in an attempt to find a community for their thirteen-year-old daughter, Tilly, who has special needs. Run by a charismatic child behavior guru who specializes in helping families with children who are "nonneurotypical," Camp Harmony initially seems like the answer to all their problems. But as the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that there is something a little off about the camp and its leader, Scott Bean. While this plot drives much of the novel on the surface, layered into the tension are vivid examples that make the story about much more than Camp Harmony. Parkhurst paints an intimate picture of how children like Tilly navigate the world, from painfully awkward moments to emotional tantrums to the rare but shining instances of youthful insight.

The key to this careful layering of stories is in Harmony's narrative style. Narrated alternately by Tilly's younger sister, Iris, and their mother, Alexandra, the novel is balanced between suspense and emotional heft. Eleven-year-old Iris is skeptical of Camp Harmony from the beginning, and her straightforward cynicism helps the reader quickly come to share her suspicions about the camp. Meanwhile, Alexandra tells the story of how the Hammond family came to this point, beginning five years before the present day. As readers marvel at the adults' inability to see what's really going on at Camp Harmony, Alexandra's flashbacks force them to slow down and engage with the emotional struggle of the story. Her reflections on her ability to support and love her daughter are deeply self-critical and heartbreakingly desperate. "Sometimes you feel like you're being mummified," she reflects as she thinks about the first time she met the leader of Camp Harmony, "and that you didn't even realize it until Scott Bean offered you a pair of scissors." Gradually, readers become familiar with the overwhelming feelings of self-doubt involved in parenting a child with special needs. Immersed in Alexandra's desperation and fear, the slowly intensifying plot begins to feel inevitable—Camp Harmony, however flawed it might be, is also the Hammond family's last hope.

Parkhurst's narrative restraint makes Harmony a classic slow burn. From the very first pages of the novel, a deep sense of dread prevails. The prologue, in which an older Alexandra looks back at Camp Harmony and ponders how it all could have gone differently, pulls the reader in, and Parkhurst never lets go. With every chapter narrated in the present-tense by Iris, Camp Harmony seems to flirt ever closer to tipping over the edge into a cult: locked doors, alcohol, and "toxins" like bug spray are forbidden, car keys and electronic devices are surrendered to the camp's leader, and camp residents are encouraged to think of themselves not as individual people or families, but as a unified Camp Harmony family. Every scene is charged with tension, as if the situation could explode at any moment, and the reader quickly finds themselves swept up in the characters' unfolding stories.

The suspense of the plot does not distract from the strength of Parkhurst's main characters. Alexandra and Iris are easy to identify with, primarily because their love and empathy for Tilly are intertwined with the painfully human struggles of anger and irritation. While Alexandra and Iris clearly want what's best for Tilly, they're also candid in acknowledging their own failures and setbacks; they are brutally honest about their moments of frustration and even disgust. Their struggles might be specific (for example, getting Tilly to take a shower or refrain from talking about genitalia at the dinner table), but...