Chris Hewitt, The Minnesota Star Tribune

I’m tempted to call “The Phoebe Variations” a came-of-age book.

Wisconsin writer Jane Hamilton’s eighth novel — the “A Map of the World” writer’s first since “ The Excellent Lombards ” in 2016 — is of a familiar type. It’s a summer-that-changed-everything story that focuses on Phoebe, who is 17, very dramatic, obsessed with “Jane Eyre,” frustrated with her mother Greta and eager for her life to begin, particularly if it does not include her do-gooding mom.

In some ways, that sounds more like an autobiographical/MFA thesis work you’d expect from a debut novelist. What separates “Phoebe” from that sort of book is that Hamilton, who is 68, writes from the perspective of an older woman looking back on things that happened in 1974 and finally unders

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