From School Library Journal
Gr 5-8-Eleven-year-old Jaynell Lambert often slips into the junkyard beside her house and sits behind the wheel of a salvaged car, "driving" herself wherever her imagination will take her. It is the summer of 1968 in a desolate Texas town, and her recently widowed grandfather has left his homestead to move into the Lambert house, where his increasingly bizarre behavior convinces Jaynell's parents that he is becoming senile. With Jaynell in tow, Grandpap makes daily treks to the cemetery to talk to the headstones of Moon's departed citizens, and he impulsively buys a gaudy emerald green Cadillac convertible that he allows his granddaughter to drive in open fields. Even though she empathizes with her grandfather's loneliness and his quirky methods of coping with it, the child is aghast when he gives away his own unoccupied homestead to the town's dirt-poor social outcasts. After his sudden death, her family contrives to reclaim the property that they feel is rightfully their own, and Jaynell learns sobering lessons about the dark side of human nature yet at the same time discovers honesty, courage, and kindness in unlikely places. This nostalgic parable about loss and redemption is at once gritty and poetic, stark and sentimental, howlingly funny and depressingly sad, but it is a solid page-turner. Holt once again displays her remarkable gift for creating endearingly eccentric characters as well as witty dialogue rich in dialect and idiom.-William McLoughlin, Brookside School, Worthington, OH
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Gr. 5-7. In Holt's National Book Award winner,
When Zachary Beaver Came to Town (1999), and in
My Louisiana Sky (1998), both
Booklist Editors' Choices, the southern small-town settings were an integral part of the story, and the particulars were spare and telling. Here the authentic local color about Moon, Texas, in 1968 sometimes takes over the story, and there are just too many town characters to visit. At 11, Jaynell is a tomboy (Daddy calls her "boy"). Unlike her ultrafeminine sister, she loves to hunt, practice driving, and watch the preparations for the first trip to the moon. She watches over Grandpap as he visits his wife's grave, wanders around town, and buys a Cadillac for cash. Why does he help a "white-trash" family move into his old home? Jaynell's first-person narrative is strong and tender. It's her story and the discovery of a wounding family secret that keeps you reading.
Hazel RochmanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
