Just as in a real small town, everything in life complicates everything else. Kerr sums up the tension in the house on Christmas by writing that fights "kept erupting that morning like kernels of corn popping out on a hot pan just when you thought there weren't any left under the ones that'd already blown." It's enough for us to hear only one side of a phone conversation, as when Evie's mother tells her, "That's ridiculous! You haven't known anything of the kind all your life!" Evie meets Patsy early on in the book, so her lifelong loneliness stands out more like a shadow, something that's now behind her. The writing, top-of-the-line Kerr, feels doubly rich and full because what isn't said also fills the page. So, truth to tell, she's probably right for Doug. But dreadful as Bella is, it's her noisy disapproval of farming that leads to Doug's own realization that deep down he longs to leave the farm. "She's got a will like the river," as Evie says, and she loves Evie for real.Īnd the whole family, including Evie, is appalled by her older brother Doug's irritating sorority girlfriend (a self-described "Vicious Veggie" who won't "eat anything that had a face").
The whole town, for instance, knows instantly that Patsy Duff, the gorgeous, pampered trophy daughter of the town banker, is only going through a rebellious stage when she takes up with Evie. It's her 15-year-old brother, Parr, the narrator of the novel, who points out that the whole family could just as accurately be called a stereotype: "We came from farmers, we bred farmers, we looked like farmers, and we'd probably die farmers."īut over and over, anyone who tries to dismiss anyone else as a stereotype eventually gets it wrong or misses the point. As Evie's mother puts it, "You're what everybody's always thought one of those women was like."īut Evie's so sweet, funny and vivid, she never seems like a stereotype. With "I am what I am" sureness, Evie wears her brother's bomber jacket, smokes "no hands," wisecracks, does the work of two men and can fix anything mechanical on her family's small Missouri farm. Kerr's 18th book for young adults, is one of the author's bravest creations - not because she's a lesbian, but because to look at her you'd think she was absolutely a stereotype. (Ages 12 and up)ĮIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD Evie Burrman, the eye of the hurricane in M.
0 kommentar(er)
