IN ZANESVILLE

Name: IN ZANESVILLE
Author: Jo Ann Beard
ISBN: 978-0-316-08447-5

by Jo Ann Beard ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 25, 2011

This could be an instruction book for a perceptive teenager. For an adult, it resonates as a bittersweet remembrance of a...

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Angst, and a grudging reconciliation to childhood being left behind, are the heart of this debut novel.

The narrator and her best friend, Felicia, began the summer before entering high school babysitting the six children of a biker gang couple, an occupation that ends morbidly when the husband holds the hand of a disobedient child over an open gas flame. After that display of brutality, the pair decide to quit, even though they need money to get their trendy freshman wardrobe out of lay-away. The bored and restless girls, residing in the prototypical 1970s mid-western small town, live in something less than a Happy Days environment. Both girls' mothers work too hard and yell too much. The narrator's father supposedly sells house siding, but he spends most days drinking vodka and watching birds and squirrels from the kitchen window, at least until he becomes drunk enough to yell "I'll say this about that!" in response to attempts at conversation. The third person narrator remains nameless, although readers learn she bears one of the names from Little Women. The author has beautifully captured how a shy but observant girl might interpret the awkwardness and the struggle for acceptance in the high school's perplexing social milieu. Beard also introduces a fine cast of minor characters. Much of the narrative is played off Felicia, anxious and uncertain herself, as the two girls attempt to participate in marching band, suffer and then seek detention, discover boys and confront mortality when the mother of an acquaintance dies. But it is Felicia, "eyes gone flat" when she walks off with a boy during a party, who provokes the narrator's revelation that even the sweetest childhood bonds can become flawed and fragile mature friendships.

This could be an instruction book for a perceptive teenager. For an adult, it resonates as a bittersweet remembrance of a time when life was more difficult than it should have been.

Pub Date: April 25, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-316-08447-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FESTIVAL DAYS
by Jo Ann Beard

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BOYS OF MY YOUTH
by Jo Ann Beard

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THE YELLOW BIRD SINGS

by Jennifer Rosner ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020

A mother and her child-prodigy daughter struggle to survive the Holocaust by telling stories and remembering the power of...

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Rosner’s debut novel is a World War II story with a Room-like twist, one that also deftly examines the ways in which art and imagination can sustain us.

Five-year-old Shira is a prodigy. She hears entire musical passages in her head, which “take shape and pulse through her, quiet at first, then building in intensity and growing louder.” But making sounds is something Shira is not permitted to do. She and her mother, Róża, are Jews who are hiding in a barn in German-occupied Poland. Soldiers have shot Róża’s husband and dragged her parents away, and after a narrow escape, mother and daughter cower in a hayloft day and night, relying on the farmer and his wife to keep them safe from neighbors and passing patrols. The wife sneaks Shira outside for fresh air; the husband visits Róża late at night in the hayloft to exact his price. To keep Shira occupied and quiet the rest of the time, Róża spins tales of a little girl and a yellow bird in an enchanted but silent garden menaced by giants; only the bird is allowed to sing. But when Róża is offered a chance to hide Shira in an orphanage, she must weigh her daughter’s safety against her desire to keep the girl close. Rosner builds the tension as the novel progresses, wisely moving the action out of the barn before the premise grows tired or repetitive. This is a Holocaust novel, but it’s also an effective work of suspense, and Rosner’s understanding of how art plays a role in our lives, even at the worst of times, is impressive.

A mother and her child-prodigy daughter struggle to survive the Holocaust by telling stories and remembering the power of music.

Pub Date: March 3, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-250-17977-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION

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IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES

by Julia Alvarez ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1994

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Brimming with warmth and vitality, this new novel by the author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) is a paean to the power of female courage. The butterflies are four smart and lovely Dominican sisters growing up during Trujillo's despotic regime. While her parents try desperately to cling to their imagined island of security in a swelling sea of fear and intimidation, Minerva Mirabal—the sharpest and boldest of the daughters, born with a fierce will to fight injustice—jumps headfirst into the revolutionary tide. Her sisters come upon their courage more gradually, through a passionate, protective love of family or through the sheer impossibility of closing their eyes to the horrors around them. Together, their bravery and determination meld into a seemingly insurmountable force, making Trujillo, for all his power, appear a puny adversary. Alvarez writes beautifully, whether creating the ten-year-old Maria Teresa's charming diary entries or describing Minerva's trip home after her first unsettling confrontation with Trujillo: ``As the road darkened, the beams of our headlights filled with hundreds of blinded moths. Where they hit the windshield, they left blurry marks, until it seemed like I was looking at the world through a curtain of tears.'' If the Mirabal sisters are iron-winged butterflies, their men—father and husbands—often resemble those blinded moths, feeble and fallible. Still, the women view them with kind, forgiving eyes, and though there's no question of which sex is being celebrated here, a sweet and accepting spirit toward frailty, if not human cruelty, prevails. This is not Garc°a M†rquez or Allende territory (no green hair or floating bodies); Alvarez's voice is her own, grounded in realism yet alive with the magic of everyday human beings who summon extraordinary courage and determination to fight for their beliefs. As mesmerizing as the Mirabal sisters themselves. (First printing of 40,000; $40,000 ad/promo; author tour)