BAD SEED
Sunday June 8, 2003
By Julia Kamysz Lane
There is always good reason not to judge a book by its cover. In her debut novel, Rebecca Donner creates a twist on the typical villain. With her halo of blond hair, 9-year-old Bridget looks like an angel, and besides, how bad can a little girl be?
Apparently, very. Abandoned as a baby in a parking lot, she lived in a group home and then moved to one foster home after another suffering tremendous emotional and physical abuse. With such role models, it's no wonder Bridget is the bully of Sunset Terrace, a decrepit rent-controlled apartment complex in California. It is 1983 and with the exception of widowed childless Mrs. Grover and the dysfunctional Hamilton family, the remaining apartments shelter desperate single mothers on welfare.
Having moved 11 times in the past three years, widowed cook Elaine Kierson is eager to put down roots for her two young daughters, Hannah and Daisy. Sunset Terrace seems like a good place to start over and adapt to life without her husband, Roger. When they arrive at the complex and meet the cheap jerk of a landlord, Warren Wilkes, Donner makes it plain that any self-confidence Elaine once had is gone.
Upon meeting Mr. Wilkes, Elaine panics: "What did he see when he looked at her? A pitiful, down-on-her-luck woman with misbehaving children, a charity case?" She is a naive people-pleaser and will soon learn that her girls are quite well-mannered compared with the kids who will be their neighbors.
As the youngest, Daisy fits in more readily and finds a friend within a matter of hours. Hannah on the other hand is already older than her years due to the tragic death of her dad and the constant moving around. She is suspicious of her new surroundings and the new kids, unsure of how long they will stay despite her mother's insistence that this is home for a good while. She spends the first few days tending to her pet turtle, who has been her only steadfast friend since her dad died and their mother became an escape artist.
Hannah grows fascinated by the little blond girl who sings nasty, ruse-laden songs while balanced on the chain-link fence at night and steals candy from the local corner store. Before long, Hannah and Bridget become best friends. After hearing the gossip about Bridget's past from Mormon neighbor Tanya and Bridget's chain-smoking foster mother, Joan, Elaine feels sorry for Bridget and somehow overlooks the dangerous influence she begins to have on Hannah. In fact, she encourages Hannah to play as much as she wants with her new friend and allows Bridget to stay for dinner and spend the night when Joan takes off to visit her out-of-town boyfriend.
Just as Hannah thinks her relationship with fun, daring Bridget will change everything for the better, Elaine begins to cling to the new man in her life with similar desperate expectations. Sam is a divorced high school teacher whose teenage son lives with his ex-wife. His resemblance to Roger is uncanny and Donner does an excellent job of introducing him slowly, so that the reader is initially wary of his intentions out of a concern for the fragile Elaine. Unlike Bridget, it is not clear what kind of influence he will wield.
The events leading up to the horrifying climax - which begs the question, "Must a good person be corrupted in order to overcome evil?" - are small and unimportant on their own. But because Donner offers them as mini-chapters, like snapshots in a family album, the images they elicit build one on top of another to create a hideous, three-dimensional landscape peopled by lonely, strange creatures and the unlikely monster who preyed on their insecurities.
Julia Kamysz Lane has contributed to the New York Times Magazine, Poets & Writers, Book and other publications.