The Honey Thief’s main character is Eva, the adolescent daughter of Miriam. Aimee’s rebellion is multilayered she strains against the conventions of her day, and against her family, with mixed consequences for herself. I could have been born a child who walked the middle road instead, I needed both solitude and touch with a hunger that left me breathless, split in two.”Īimee’s yearning to break free of her muddy, rural roots lurches her into the hell of a 19th-century sweatshop.

In Unravelling, the central character Aimee says, “I could have been named Charity or Grace, been stronger, or more yielding. She gradually reveals the struggles that take place in the depths of her characters’ minds, often never even developing into words or dialogue, but driving her characters as surely and steadily as a heartbeat. In her most recent novel, Awake Graver taps into the rich vein of motherhood, and follows Anna, whose 9-year-old son suffers from a rare (and real) genetic disorder called XP, a hypersensitivity to UV radiation.Īlthough her three novels vary in terms of setting, character and plot, a unifying thread woven through all her stories is rebellion: profound, internal rebellion. The Honey Thief revolves around a fatherless shoplifter, Eva, who spends most of her twelfth summer alone, drifting in an adolescent no-woman’s-land between childhood and maturity. Unravelling spans the adolescence and young adulthood of Aimee, a 19th century girl determined to break free of the tightly laced reality of New England farm life. She ferries her readers into the psyches of her characters, nearly all of whom are women in her three novels: Unravelling, The Honey Thief, and Awake. Graver, who teaches at Boston College, was the youngest recipient of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and has published work in Best American Essays and Best American Short Stories, is also a masterful novelist. At times during my reading of all three of Elizabeth Graver’s novels, I found myself weeping not because of a tragic twist of plot, but because I recognized my own shadowed reflection staring back at me.

Unravelling by Elizabeth Graver