Review by Booklist Review
Sent to her grandparents while her parents contemplate divorce, Sally comes to terms with herself and her life in a story set in the 1950s.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Infusing her first novel with black vernacular as convincing as Alice Walker's, imaginative metaphors that rival Maya Angelou's and humor as delicious as Zora Neale Hurston's, Sanders has created a refreshing new voice--that of Clover Hill, a motherless 10-year-old living on a South Carolina peach farm. When her father, Gaten, is killed in a car crash a few hours after marrying Sara Kate, a white stranger frowned upon by Gaten's black kinfolk, the young widow insists on raising Clover and helping her to accept her father's death. Shrewd, precocious and utterly endearing, Clover combines a little girl's tenderness with a mature woman's perception. In a child's simple, disorganized narrative dotted with deceptively sophisticated observations and characterizations, Sanders depicts a middle-class, superstitious, small-town South where desegregation has occurred politically but not psychologically. Sensitive and amusing, the novel cut this last comparison? weakens those above, and would need to be amplified to signify meaning to those unfamiliar with Ellen Foster also delivers an oblique but provocative statement about race relations. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
It is 1959 and 13-year-old Sally Maulden is sent to Coldwater, Arkansas, to live with her grandparents while her parents decide whether to divorce. Grandfather Maulden is the town doctor whose ``lab'' turns out bottles of his popular Inside Medicine, while Grandmother wages war with the local newspaper editor over removal of an unsightly outhouse visible to her Missionary Society ladies luncheon. Sally strikes up a friendship with the town dance teacher and develops her first major crush. That the novel is filled with such characters, all with their own eccentricities, may spread the story a bit thin, but Mickle handles the challenge well. Her descriptions of people and places are wonderfully on target: ``The afternoon was mild, a warm late December day with leaves on the ground and grass the color of tea.'' Sally is an engaging narrator whose story is told with humor and compassion. Recommended.-- Mary K. Prokop, CEL Regional Lib., Savannah, Ga. (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-- Sally Maulden is 13, and her parents are divorcing. She confronts her hurt and fury at parents who are so seemingly selfish as to dump her with her grandparents in Coldwater, Arkansas while they sort things out; she tries to take blame and contrive situations that will put the puzzle back together. She occupies her time observing her grandfather and his home-brewed medicines that are in high demand but under legal censure. Her grandmother is busy : feuding with the newspaper editor over the last outhouse in town, on his property outside her living room window. Sally befriends a rich neighbor and falls in love with him, seeing in him an answer to all her problems. This is a realistic story of a believable heroine who grows up, thanks to love and time, in a small town in the 1960s. The tale is well written, and offers today's readers the chance to look at divorce in process and adolescent concerns from a quieter perspective than their everyday lives. --Dorcas Hand, Episcopal High School, Bellaire, TX (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 Kirkus Book Review
With a soft-spoken, gentle good humor, Sanders' debut novel--set in a black enclave in South Carolina--deals with the abrasive presence of a white woman brought into a ""family"" by marriage. A tough if precocious little narrator--a ten-year-old girl--holds sentimentality at bay. Clover's daddy, an elementary-school principal, promised her a big surprise one day, but instead of a ten-speed bike, he brought home Sara Kate, the white woman he planned to marry. Sara Kate's introduction to Gaten's family and friends is just as rocky, with growls like: ""Gaten just turned a fool when he met Sara Kate."" Then tragedy strikes: Directly after the wedding, there's an auto accident, Gaten is killed, and Sara Kate and Clover, an unlikely grief-wracked pair, are thrown together. The men stand aside, but the women show they have no use for what Clover's Aunt Everleen calls ""Miss Uppity-class."" As for Clover, she must put up with Sara Kate's meals, with things ""cooked flat-out in water,"" with the way Sara Kate has of timidly asking, rather than telling, Clover what to do, and with her lonely, isolated sadnesses. Eventually, though, Clover will have to defend Sara Kate, even from Aunt Everleen: ""Why can't they see that when you live with someone and they aren't mean or nothing they kind of grow on you?"" By the end, genuinely kind people kind of grow on each other even before a dramatic (and unnecessary) bit of heroism from Sara Kate. Although Clover's ten-year-old voice has adult overtones, she's easy to take as a guide to the neighborhood while--in the meantime--some likable people have their say and stake out territories. On the whole, then, an upbeat tale with a few healthy, hortatory jabs at racial barriers. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by School Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
