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I read this with my 8 and 13 year old kids (had to change or skip over parts that were rather too dark). It seemed like a great read at first interspersed with science and neat facts, but the story turned dark as the mom started going through feelings that would change the young girls life. Mostly it wasn't very obvious to my kids (although my 13 year old mentioned how crazy the mom was). The ending is rather tragic. Personally, I enjoyed the book in how it was written with some fun additions that make you realize how this young girl sees things.

An unusual, imaginative book. Reads effortlessly... Spend a few hours in an island universe of two: the eccentric, increasingly unstable mother and her child narrator, also not completely sane, in ways you won't see coming, and a handful of outlying characters. The plot is minimal and unnecessary, just frame to the experience of reading the book which is essentially goalless, like a child might be goalless.

This book is almost a prequel to Dept of Speculation. One can imagine that a child who grew up under these circumstances would grow up and have the marriage described in Dept. In some ways her first novel is richer than the second one, but it peters out by the end.

I wish that Ms Offill would write more wonderful novels! Excellent writer.

wonderfully written from the perspective of a child.

Not as good as her second book in my opinion.

I read this book when it first came out in the 1990's and just re-read it this weekend. I love a book told from the POV of a child, and from this perspective, it did not disappoint. The writing is powerful and lyrical, and at the same time, haunting and tragic as Anna is obviously mentally ill. I loved Grace's perspective and attempts to make sense of her bizarre world. I was confused by the ending, though....wish I knew how that fit into the rest of the story.

The reader gets a definite sense of the narrator's age in Jenny Offill's debut novel, LAST THINGS. She views everything she relates to us openly and unflinchingly, as a child would do -- and the things she doesn't completely understand are naturally colored with the myths and stories told to her by her increasingly deranged mother, combined with extrapolations produced by her own imagination.
Grace's parents are incredibly mismatched. Her father is a complete realist, grounded in science and fact. He works as a teacher in the small Vermont town in which they live, until his objections to a prayer circle held within earshot of his office draw the disfavor of the administration. At one point, we are told that he proposed to her mother with the words 'You're the only woman I've met that will never bore me'. That's certainly proven to be true. Her mother -- who is an ornithologist working at a nearby raptor center -- is given to spouting native myths and beliefs from the far corners of the earth, sometimes obviously inventing stories on the spot to validate her increasingly odd actions. She sometimes speaks and writes in a language invented for her by her father, and attempts to teach it to Grace. When her pronouncements and beliefs begin to seep into her daughter's behavior at school, she vows to home-school young Grace, and the girl is pulled further into her mother's fantasy world.
Children usually remember events clearly but in a spotty way -- when speaking of memories, they tend to bounce from one to the next, not concerned (as an adult narrator might be) with beginnings and endings, with smoothing out the rough edges of memory. They remember the parts that have the greatest emotional effect on them, either directly or obliquely. Offill has reproduced this tendency by giving her young storyteller an accurate voice -- it's not a stretch for us to imagine that we're listening to the story through Grace's own words. That being said, the writing is very polished and effective -- as the book spirals through scene after scene to its climax, the effect is very much like a wild dream that comes with the fever of an illness. It's a powerful current that draws the reader in, making the book difficult to put down.
It's an interesting ride -- but there's an aching sadness left at the thought of what the shenanigans of Grace's parents are doing to her, to what sort of long-term effects they might have on the impressionable psyche of an 8-year-old girl. It makes me wonder if the two of them gave any thought to how they would raise a child once they had one. Her mother is hopeless, and her father, although he's a bit more grounded in reality, seems completely clueless in relating to his daughter. I can't imagine her emerging from this ordeal without having a fairly skewed view of the world.
It's an odd little book -- but very skillfully written, interesting and entertaining. Sometimes it's pretty scary to look as an adult through the eyes of a child -- it makes for a compelling read.