Teen Fiction - Family & Relationships, Teen Fiction - School, Teen Fiction - Poetry
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Overview
Allie Benton's summer at her grandparents' house in Minnesota is the same as it's always been: northern lights and pine trees, family gossip and root beer floats. She's come here to escape Nebraska's tornado season every summer for as long as she can remember. The only difference is, this time no one's coming to take her back to Nebraska when fall rolls around.
With her father dead, her mother run off to heaven knows where, and her twin brother, seven years buried, just a ghost in her memory, Allie settles in with her grandparents for a cold Minnesota winter. But it's hard to fit in at a new school when her family can't afford to buy her a pair of blue jeans. And, in an ethnically divided community, Allie isn't even allowed to choose the friends she wants-handsome Joey Redfern and Lidia, the beautiful Ojibwe girl who calls Allie my niijikwe, "my friend."
With a strong poetic voice, Julie Williams creates snapshots of Allie piecing a new life together- longing for her mother, grieving for her father, remembering her brother, and struggling to do what's right in an imperfect world. As the people around her come and go, Allie starts to get a sense of who she is, and of what she can hold on to despite the changes in her world.
In this debut novel in verse, Williams captures life in the 1960s in northern Minnesota. Fourteen-year-old Allie longs for her mother who has abandoned her, grieves for her late father, and struggles to do what's right in an imperfect world.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Using the increasingly popular free-verse format for her first novel, Williams turns the internal monologue of a sad 13-year-old girl into a painful soliloquy. Allie has lived a life filled with sadness: her twin brother, Tuck, died at the age of six and, as the story opens, her beloved father passes away unexpectedly. She has never been close to her mother, who becomes even more detached with her husband's death. Mother and daughter move to Minnesota to stay with her grandparents, a wise and loving grandfather, and a grandmother who can be both loving and vicious ("Don't you even miss your/ brother?' she spits"). There's also a powerful subplot involving an abusive teacher and two Indian students, one of whom also lost a parent and becomes a friend to Allie. Williams ably demonstrates that the biggest emotions can often be best expressed through the leanest of sentences ("I hate school/ and even though I still/ hate my mom/ I wish she would come home"). Her smooth pacing intersperses straightforward narrative with moments of surprising impact, as when Allie tells of the night she was at her father's bedside, when he died. The book is set in the 1960s, but the time frame is largely irrelevant-the themes and situations know no era. Readers who have experienced loss will find tenacious strands of hope woven into Allie's poetry. Ages 14-up. (Mar.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.Children's Literature
The trend for free-verse novels continues with Williams's debut portrait of Allie's year away from tornado-prone Nebraska, living with her grandparents in frigid, rural Minnesota, in the early 1960s. As with most recent problem novels, multiple, enormous, harrowing problems abound: Allie lost her twin brother to a congenital heart ailment; she has just buried her beloved father; her difficult mother has abandoned her; and at school she is ostracized for trying to befriend an Ojibwe girl who is beaten and raped by an abusive teacher, and for pursuing a forbidden romance with an Ojibwe boy—all against the backdrop of grinding poverty and brutal Minnesota blizzards. Allie manages to triumph over just about all her obstacles, though it strains credulity that an abusive teacher would be fired on the strength of one student's letter sent to the principal, with no further questioning or investigation, during an era when even severe corporal punishment (especially practiced against minority students) was taken for granted. These quibbles aside, the poems themselves faithfully record Allie's painful emotions with many a haunting image and memorable line, as when Allie's mother explodes, "Sometimes I hate my mother," and Allie wonders "if she/ had any idea/ how most days I feel about her/ same way she feels about Gram." Williams has made vivid the truth that we all live in tornado season, finally emerging from our storm cellars, "hoping against/ wildest hope that up aboveground/ nothing you love has been/ blow away." 2004, HarperTempest, Ages 12 up.—Claudia Mills
VOYA
Allie's life changes drastically when her father dies from lung cancer. Allie's mother, Maggie, is having a hard time dealing with the loss so she takes Allie to live with her grandparents in Minnesota and then disappears. Allie feels deserted by her mother, and her sadness at the loss of her father makes life very lonely. As summer ends and Allie must start school, her loneliness increases. She is uncomfortable because of her lack of money, and she does not fit in with the other students. Allie finds some solace from the tentative friendship she forges with a young Native American girl, Lidia White Cloud, who is unpopular because of her ethnicity. But the fragile bonds of friendship are destroyed when Lidia is severelly beaten by a teacher and disappears from school. The telling of Allie's story in the form of poetry makes this coming-of-age novel quite accessible. Williams's poetry is filled with vivid imagery that transports the reader into Allie's life with amazing swiftness. Each poem flows seamlessly into the next. Williams brings forth the issues of racism and sexual abuse in a subtle but effective manner. Teens will easily relate to Allie and some of the difficult decisions she faces. VOYA Codes: 4Q 3P M J S (Better than most, marred only by occasional lapses; Will appeal with pushing; Middle School, defined as grades 6 to 8; Junior High, defined as grades 7 to 9; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12). 2004, HarperTempest, 272p., and PLB Ages 11 to 18.—Lori Matthews
School Library Journal
Gr 7-9-"You can only hunker down so long-" hoping that "nothing you love has been/blown away." That's the overriding, laborious theme in Williams's novel in poetry form, which is set in the 1960s. The idea of weathering tornadoes becomes a metaphor for 13-year-old Allie's life as she deals with her father's death, adjusts to a move from Nebraska to a small town in Minnesota, tries to reach out to her emotionally distant mother, struggles to make friends, and refuses to go along with the local prejudice against the Ojibwe people who live nearby. Unfortunately, the story line is confusing from the start, as Allie's poems move back and forth in time, describing the events happening to her now and gradually revealing important occurrences from the past. It is clear that her family has survived the devastation of a tornado, but it takes a long time for readers to discover the calamity's true effects and to understand just what caused the death of her twin brother several years ago. In trying to craft small poetic glimpses at the characters' lives, the author loses sight of telling her story coherently. There is no clear characterization here, and none of the potentially intriguing relationships are focused on in a cohesive way. All in all, the poems are neither insightful nor well written.-Sharon Korbeck, Waupaca Area Public Library, WI Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.Kirkus Reviews
The tornado that is a prologue to this work, set in northern Minnesota in the early 1960s, serves as a metaphor for lives ripped asunder much as a genuine twister tears up land and property. A lot in 14-year-old Allie's life falls apart: her beloved father dies; her emotionally unstable mother disappears ever more frequently; and she witnesses shocking injustices committed against Native American neighbors and classmates. As with the heroine of Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust, Allie, a gifted writer, describes her feelings and the ways she learns to come to grips with tragedies, uncertainties, and a forbidden first love in the detached, first-person poems that set out the story. The disjointed, non-narrative style carries the novel's torn-apart metaphor further, yet somehow, there is order and a flow amid the chaos. Teens will be drawn into Allie's exploration of her pain and how she learns, through the strength of family bonds, to "escape tornado season." Some mild expletives throughout will seem realistic and justified. (Fiction. 12+)Book Details
Published
March 1, 2004
Publisher
New York : Harper Tempest, c2004.
Pages
272
Format
Binding
ISBN
9780060086404