Review by Booklist Review
Titania, called Ti, loops her story from her teen years in Badin, North Carolina, to the present, when she tries to share her real self with her grown daughters. She manages the transitions from childhood to present with uncanny grace: the dramas witnessed between her controlling mother and her alcoholic father, always in a bitter dance where both know the steps. The year she is 13, what Ti wants, above all, is to twirl a fire baton, and she learns to do so really well. She's goaded by the need to push away from her mother and from her longtime best friend and by her girlish, vivid desire for a young World War II veteran who helps her figure out how to light the baton without igniting herself. Along the way, we see the husband who left and Ti's sunny daughters, reflected in her own musings about what she did and how she chose. A whole life is skeined together with beauty and clarity. --GraceAnne A. DeCandido
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
At the beginning of this appealing coming-of-age novel, narrator Titania Anne Gentry is a 43-year-old woman whose two grown daughters think she's a born loser. Determined to prove them wrong, Ti recalls growing up in tiny Badin, N.C., during the 1940s, focusing on the year she turned 13 and realized her dream of becoming a "champeen" fire-baton twirler. Her parents were a mess: mother Joan a "failed movie star, a failed piano player" and handsome Franklin Gentry an alcoholic womanizer who aimed to be a big-time baseball player and claimed to be a chiropractor, and failed at both. Ti remembers herself as a dreamy adolescent forced to take piano lessons by Joan, who projected her own dreams of concert glory onto her only child. But Ti twirled her baton in secret and fantasized about next-door neighbor Sebastian "Sabby" McSherry, a wounded paratrooper discharged from serving in WWII in France. Hoping to capture his heart with her twirling prowess, Ti only succeeded in winning his friendship, which served her better. When Ti performed a dazzling routine with the fire baton Sabby designed for her, she won best of show at the county competition and made her family proud. Thirty years later, she comes to terms with this crucial event in her life, acknowledging that her triumph was one of self-determination and of absolute faith in herself. This, she intends to tell her daughters, makes her a true winner. This framing device, however, is rushed, corny and flat compared to the bittersweet tale of pubescent angst, and Joan and Franklin are unconvincing, stock characters. But narrator Ti is a plucky heroine who's as winsome as she is defiantly fierce. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Medwed's first novel, Mail, was enjoyed by many, and she does not disappoint with her second, engaging book. Medwed sticks to what she knows best--the lives of the inhabitants of Cambridge, MA. Daisy and Henry Lewis have been married for 20-odd years, and they've annually served as a host family to foreign students going to Harvard for a semester. Everything goes smoothly until Henry becomes obsessed with all things French, immersing himself in French food and culture, donning a beret, and eventually running off with the latest foreign student, the very French Giselle. After Daisy gets over the shock of losing her husband, she begins a relationship with a lovable parasitologist named Truman Wolff, for whom the term "host family" sports an entirely different meaning. This is a charming and pleasant read for which Medwed's fans will most likely be waiting in line. Recommended for public libraries.--Beth Gibbs, P.L. of Charlotte (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
YA-Middle-aged Titania Gentry recounts her 13th year with its cacophony of parental disagreements, dissolving childhood friendships, a burgeoning but amorphous fascination with an older man, and-above all-her compulsion to twirl fire on the ends of her baton. The adult Titania tries to come to terms with her present, including her two daughters, her estranged husband, and the continuing presence in her life of her social-climbing mother who, in turn, seems to have made peace with her own hard-drinking, womanizing mate. Miller's depiction of small-town America during the last years of World War II is vibrant while her Titania is both a child of her time and the universal girl on the cusp of adolescence. Child and adult characters receive carefully wrought attention, making it evident that the narrator remembers her childish worldview while having acquired a more mature one to fit the same set of facts. While the child Titania can talk dirty in a way suited to her age and the era, it is the adult Titania's longer view of events that makes this novel suitable to older teens. Mature readers will cheer Ti on as she develops her dream to twirl fire into really doing it, and will be able to catch a glimpse of how childhood still clings to the middle-aged woman.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by School Library Journal Review
