Schroder: A Novel

Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2013: Eric Kennedy has a lot of explaining to do. First, there’s the matter of his fabricating a Massachusetts seaside childhood to hide his East German roots--and his appropriation of the Kennedy name at age 14, a switch he never mentioned to his wife. Then there’s his desperate sort-of accidental post-divorce abduction of their precocious six-year-old daughter, Meadow. Inspired partly by a true story, Amity Gaige's novel tracks the week Eric and Meadow spend on the road, days he remembers as some of the best of his life. This gorgeously expressed, slippery apologia from the once and future Schroder--sympathetic, even in his appalling negligence--limns the limits of self-made American identity, while paying tribute to the irrational exuberance of parental love. --Mari Malcolm