From School Library Journal
Grade 8 Up In this bizarre tale entrenched in genetics and human history, familial love is unabashedly and horrifically skewed, twisted, and swathed, reminiscent of the works of Poe, Shelley, and Hawthorne. Readers are introduced to the young woman narrator when she is seven, trapped in a small town and a victim of a family's dark legacy: a maternal obsession so extreme that it preys upon the minds of its maligned descendants, forcing them to pursue any means necessary to keep their mothers with them always. Ivy and her devout mother live across the street from a pair of reclusive, elderly twin brothers who run the pharmacy. Her mother used to work for the Rumbaughs, and, over the years, Ivy comes to understand her connection to the eccentric men, their deep bond with their now-deceased mother, and their fascination with the art of taxidermy, which they share with her. Soon Ivy finds herself engrossed in embalming squirrels, kittens, chickens, and whatever else she can get her hands on. They become her tools and totems to assuage her maternal-loss anxieties. Readers can only fumble and squirm through her distorted yet straightforwardly told horror story with a combination of shock, disbelief, and dread of what no doubt will come. Gantos has written an eerie, nearly perverse gothic tale of love and devotion gone completely and frighteningly haywire. This thought-provoking story about free will and the arguments of nature and nurture will definitely stick with readers, no matter how hard they try to forget it.
Hillias J. Martin, New York Public Library Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Gr. 10-12. "I expect you might think the story . . . is perversely gothic in some unhealthy way," begins narrator Ivy, and despite her protestations that what follows is a "plain and true small-town story," readers will quickly discover that Gantos adheres faithfully to the gothic novel's elements and utterly shatters the boundaries between the sacrosanct and the perverse. Identical albino twins Abner and Adolph Rumbaugh are an oddity in their small Pennsylvania town, but as a child, Ivy adores the elderly pair and spends free hours playing at their pharmacy. Then she discovers their family curse--a warped, overwhelming love for their deceased mother, which drives them to horrifying acts to preserve her memory. As Ivy grows older, the twins' terrifying secret begins to make sense, and her own ties to the curse become clear. The intimations of incest, the details of mutilated corpses, a bizarre sex scene, and the story's creepy plotline may raise plenty of eyebrows and limit the book's audience, and lengthy passages explaining the curse may slow some readers. Still, teens (and college students) who have studied the gothic novel tradition will find many familiar, skillfully re-created elements in the tale, along with provocative questions about free will and genetic engineering, while horror fans will admire the author's ability to ably--even gleefully--spin such a shocking, darkly comic tale.^B
Gillian EngbergCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
