![]() The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Some readers may feel that the resolution comes a mite too easily, but most will enjoy the journey and be pleased when Fella’s family figures out how to come together in a new way While the girls face serious issues, amusing details and the caring adults in their lives keep the tone relatively light. The conversations she has with her sister, as well as her insights about their relationship, likewise ring true. Breathless and engaging, Fella’s distinctive voice is convincingly childlike. Fella’s present-tense narration paints pictures not just of the difficulties they face on the trip (a snowstorm, car trouble, and an unlikely thief among them), but also of their lives before Mama Lacy’s illness and of the ways that things have changed since then. The year is 2004, before the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, and the girls have been separated by hostile, antediluvian custodial laws. The two white girls squabble and share memories as they travel from West Virginia to Asheville, North Carolina, where Zany is determined to scatter Mama Lacy’s ashes in accordance with her wishes. Twelve-year-old Ophelia, nicknamed Fella, and her 16-year-old sister, Zoey Grace, aka Zany, are the daughters of a lesbian couple, Shannon and Lacy, who could not legally marry. Two sisters make an unauthorized expedition to their former hometown and in the process bring together the two parts of their divided family.ĭooley packs plenty of emotion into this eventful road trip, which takes place over the course of less than 24 hours. Likewise, the straightforward third-person narration and the gradual resistance that builds among the children to the unique horrors at the home are convincingly well-paced.Ī standout in the genre’s crowded landscape. Yet Unsworth’s use of unadorned but vivid language-such as her description of Devin’s mind in a moment of panic being “battered by fear and confusion like a bird beating its wings against the bars of a cage”-is incredibly effective. There are many familiar tropes here, the dystopian setting and the uncanny perfection of the orphanage among them. Penn Home for Childhood and insists that Kit be included too, the pair is initially delighted at the abundance of food and other comforts, but they rapidly begin to see that something terrible underpins the home. When Devin is invited by another boy to the Gabriel H. In the city, he struggles to find enough food to live on until he meets a clever, street-wise girl named Kit. Sometime in a future rife with climate crisis and brutal polarization of wealth, Devin buries his beloved grandfather and sets out to find someone to help him maintain the farm on which he’s grown up. A group of orphans uncovers a sinister plot in this chilling and engrossing tale filled with detailed, sharply drawn characters.
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