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| ~M~
Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 31751 Registered: 11-1998 |
Dear Membership – I’m back with another book recommendation, but this time it’s for a novel, not a poetry collection. It’s called Tomato Girl and it’s a powerful and deeply emotional debut novel in the classic tradition of such writers as Carson McCullers, Kaye Gibbons, and the young Truman Capote. It was written by Jayne Pupek, who has already made quite a name for herself in the poetry world. I had the pleasure of making Jayne’s acquaintance when she submitted poems to Stirring: A Literary Collection and we published two of them earlier this year. When she informed me in June that her first novel would be released in August by Algonquin Books, of course, I couldn’t wait to read it. Ms. Pupek, who lives near Richmond, is a Virginia native, holds an MA in counseling psychology, and is a former social worker. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in many print and online literary journals. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks Local Girls (DeadMule Press, 2007) and Primitive (Pudding House Press, 2004), as well as a full-length poetry collection entitled Forms of Intercession published earlier this year by Mayapple Press. Critics have called her poetry visceral and fearless, “a ribbon around a bomb. One critic said that Jayne “has the uncanny ability to dissect relationships, objects – even situations – and rearrange them according to the blueprint of her secret house of mirrors.” I must say I have to agree. In her debut novel, Tomato Girl, her narrator is a young girl named Ellie Sanders who, given the circumstances of her life, must grow up amidst terrible circumstances long before any child would be ready to handle them. I told Jayne what I most admired about this novel is that while everything seems to go wrong and the strange array of characters have flaws that range from the quirky to the piteous to the bizarre, there is no traditional “bad guy,” no single person to blame for the wide range of misfortunes and tragedies that beset them all. Jayne presents them all so compassionately and with such realism, that the reader completely understands why they might be driven to do the things they do. And through it all, young Ellie Sanders resolutely marches ahead, struggling not only to survive, but to hold together those she loves. This is a young narrator with an amazing sense of self in an adult world that has spun totally out of control. You will remember Ellie and all the other characters long after you’ve turned the last page. I have no doubt that Jayne Pupek will become a major novelist, given her enormous talent for storytelling and her unique and powerful voice. Tomato Girl by Jayne Pupek is available in the WPF BookShop under “Admin’s Featured Five-Star Book Picks." For more book recommendations, check in our NATUROPATHY (Library Forum) under Recommended Reads and Views. Love, M (Administrator) ______________________________________________________________________________________ Tomato Girl by Jane Pupek ______________________________________________________________________________________ BOOK DESCRIPTION Excerpts from Back Cover and Inside Jacket: “Welcome to Ellie’s world: I follow Mama as she weaves her way between the vegetable stands. If I stay close enough, and keep my arms to my sides, maybe I can disappear behind the dark curtains of her coat. Like a girl on a stage, I pretend my life belongs to someone else. This is not my life, I whisper. But of course, I can’t even convince myself. This is the only life I know, this one that started when Daddy left. My old one is as far away as the stars. Maybe this new life is the real one, and the life before only make believe. Tomato Girl journeys into the mind and soul of a terrified young girl who is forced into adulthood years before she is ready, and who, to compensate, retreats into a world of fantasy in which there are only happy endings. But when the realities of her life finally become inescapable, Ellie finds the strength to let go of the past and to deal with the future. As she says at the end of her story, “I am tired of carrying so many dark and broken things inside me. I can never do magic with so many fears, hurts, and secrets. They weigh down my heart like a stone.” EDITORIAL REVIEWS Amazon.com Product Description “For eleven-year-old Ellie Sanders, her father has always been the rock that she could cling to when her mother's emotional troubles became too frightening. But when he comes under the thrall of the pretty teenager who raises vegetables and tomatoes for sale at the general store that he runs, Ellie sees her security slowly slipping away. Now she must be witness and warden to her mother's gradual slide into madness. Told from Ellie's point of view, Tomato Girl takes the reader into the soul of a terrified young girl clinging desperately to childhood while being forced into adulthood years before she is ready. To save herself, she creates a secret world, a place in which her mother gets well, her father returns to being the man he was, and the Tomato Girl is banished forever. Tomato Girl marks the debut of a gifted and promising new author who has written a timeless Southern novel. From Publishers Weekly “The absorbing, unsettling debut from Pupek centers on 11-year-old Ellie Sanders, who has already seen a lot of heartache in her short, rural mid-20th-century Virginia childhood. Her beautiful but troubled mother, Julia, who today would probably be diagnosed as bipolar, has frequent outbursts necessitating restraints and horse tranquilizers, administered by Ellie's father, Rupert. When a pregnant Julia suffers a bad fall, Rupert uses the incident to bring home more trouble, in the form of Tess, the teenage tomato girl who supplies his general store with home-grown produce. Intended as a caretaker for Julia and Ellie (and a bedmate for himself), Tess, who has troubles of her own, instead initiates a series of increasingly horrific events that leaves the family irreversibly altered. Issues of racial and religious intolerance are touched on lightly, but the real focus of this accomplished debut is the fatalistic accounting of the events engulfing Ellie. Although Ellie's voice is not always consistent with her youth, she's an effective narrator whose storytelling naïveté nicely underscores her innocence. (August 2008) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. . |
