Sophie's House of Cards has all the family drama needed to keep the reader turning pages. . . . Set in New Mexico, the landscape and beauty of Albuquerque and Taos haunt the pages of this moving and enchanting story.—Bookslut
[An] intimate family novel. . . . As others move around her and walls fall down, Sophie reveals her fortitude. Her endearing story of teen pregnancy, growth, and resilience stands as the central support of Sophie's House of Cards.—Western American Literature
[An] intimate family novel. . . . As others move around her and walls fall down, Sophie reveals her fortitude. Her endearing story of teen pregnancy, growth, and resilience stands as the central support of Sophie's House of Cards.—Western American Literature
Sophie's House of Cards is a compelling piece of literature with a unique style and format. . . . With every chapter you will become engaged in the story and find yourself comparing your own journey to this intriguing expression of family life.—Porter Gulch Review
Fifty-one-year-old Peggy Granger is an ex-hippie who used to read tarot cards in exchange for food, shelter, and pocket money. Her cards have been stored away, untouched for years, until her sixteen-year-old daughter, Sophie, finds them and asks her to do a reading. Ten cards, laid out in the form of a Celtic cross, provide the titles and openings of each chapter, a clever narrative structure that links the past, present, and future of this family whose stability is as fragile as a house of cards.—Kirkus Reviews
Warner captures the New Mexican landscape beautifully: the gold of cottonwood trees in fall; the gush of desert spring; the delicate and smothering way snow falls in the mountains. But it is the placing of everyday human life directly inside this landscape that allows Warner to create such a striking portrait of the American Southwest. Her descriptions illuminate not the grandeur of a Western-film backdrop but the details of real life: making chorizo for breakfast; owning a small business; the ordinariness of sex and infidelity.—Foreword Reviews
Sharon Oard Warner's Sophie's House of Cards is infused with everything I look for in fiction: sympathetic characters whose imperfections are recognizably human, a strong sense of place, and a story that lingers long after you've closed the book and moved on to others, wishing they were as captivating and masterfully told as Warner's novel.—Wally Lamb, author of We Are Water
When I began reading, I couldn't stop because the novel felt like the rhythm of our lives. Sophie's House of Cards gets across the complexity of mother/child relationships. Warner's effortless and finely crafted storytelling is powerful. I cried after reading it. Now I want the next novel and the next.—Joy Harjo, author of Crazy Brave: A Memoir
Refreshingly honest, compulsively readable, and told with charm, heart, and more than a little wisdom, Sophie's House of Cards will make you homesick for your own imperfect family.—Summer Wood, author of Wrecker: A Novel
I finished reading Sophie's House of Cards and then spent days missing the characters. This novel about a family begun in a commune with secrets and a tangled lineage, a family that remains communal, even matrilineal, a kind of beehive whose queen—with her long and graceful body, with her compulsion to regulate the unity of the hive at her own expense—is clear-eyed about how the needs of the collective sometimes destroy the individual. The inevitable regeneration that takes place is heartbreaking and joyous. This is a wonderful novel.—Debra Monroe, author of On the Outskirts of Normal
2014-08-13
A family at a crossroads reconfigures itself in Warner's (English/University of New Mexico) second novel (Deep in the Heart, 2001, etc.). 51-year-old Peggy Granger is an ex-hippie who used to read tarot cards in exchange for food, shelter and pocket money. Her cards have been stored away, untouched for years, until her 16-year-old daughter, Sophie, finds them and asks her to do a reading. Ten cards, laid out in the form of a Celtic cross, provide the titles and openings of each chapter, a clever narrative structure that links the past, present and future of this family whose stability is as fragile as a house of cards. The cards reveal their present crisis—Sophie is pregnant and has been keeping this secret for weeks—but that isn't the only problem befalling the Granger family. Peggy's boutique in Albuquerque's Old Town is failing, her husband, Jack, has shut down their sex life after a recent heart attack, and their 12-year-old son, Ian, is being bullied at school, mostly by "Hispanic boys who have taken a dislike to him on account of his towhead and ivory complexion." To make matters worse, as Sophie delays making any decisions about her pregnancy, a visitor from Peggy's past insinuates herself into the family in more ways than one. Despite their importance to the structure of the book, the tarot cards don't show up much in the actual story, a shame because the descriptions of the symbolic meanings of the cards are interesting in ways that these characters are not. The cards require a longer gaze to really understand them, but Warner abandons the subtext of the cards, instead relying on the obvious tropes of a teenage pregnancy drama—a girl "recklessly in favor of her own happiness" forced to make unselfish choices, her family coming to terms with her decisions as they evaluate their own lives, and a stranger who turns up with an offer that makes it all so much easier than it should be.A well-written but predictable novel with unfulfilled New-Age potential.
