Used to living in poverty in a rundown Appalachian shack with her disabled stepfather, Tess Mathis finds solace in the music and rhythms that run through her head, until she meets Kamo, who is searching for his father, an encounter that resurrects long-buried nightmares and secrets about her past."
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From School Library Journal
Grade 5-7. A rather unlikely story about 14-year-old Tess Mathis, who lives with her wheelchair-bound stepfather in a "cinder-block shack on a slab" without a phone or electricity. Poor and unattractive, Tess yearns for a better life but doesn't dare hope for more. Even when she gets a job in the local supermarket, her life barely improves, although she is transfixed by a song on the radio sung by "Crux," a mysteriously anonymous rock star whom the deejays have dubbed the "secret star." The girl is bothered by strange nightmares and, more ominously, can't remember anything from her childhood. When a young man with an eye patch and scars on his face named Kamo appears, asking about her biological father, Tess is at first defensive and annoyed. But through their friendship, she is able to confront the bizarre events of the past and feel more hopeful about her future. Unfortunately, the tabloid-style plot elements (a popular jock named Butch invites her home and then tries to rape her; as a child Tess witnessed her stepfather shoot her rampaging father in self-defense and then her mother shot and wounded her stepfather before killing herself), and the unbelievable characters (Kamo is the secret star, remaining anonymous because he disdains fame and fortune and is no "heartthrob"?as if that would be a disadvantage for a rock star these days) make this cliche-ridden soap opera more appropriate as a lurid daytime talk show.?Cyrisse Jaffee, formerly at Newton Public Schools, MA
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Gr. 7^-10. Tess Mathis knows she is considered weird. At 14, she is the biggest and strongest girl in school. Dirt-poor, she lives with her disabled, loving stepfather in a cinder-block shack in the Appalachian hills. She can remember nothing before she was 10, and Daddy won't answer questions. Then a young scar-faced stranger comes to town, and she begins to confront her brutal past. The plot becomes increasingly implausible, melodramatic, and didactic. Still, some teens will enjoy the fresh romantic gender roles, however heavily the messages are spelled out. Tess is not rescued by a beast who is really a prince; instead, she rescues herself and fights off a local rapist with her own brute strength. The scar-faced loner also disturbs stereotypes: with Tess we see that he is gentle and vulnerable, and his strong wild music makes her breathless. Hazel Rochman
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More About the Author
"Conform, go crazy, or become an artist." I have a rubber stamp declaring those words, and they pretty much delineate my life. Conforming was the thing to do when I was raised, in the fifties. Even my mother, who spent her days painting animal portraits at an easel in the corner of the kitchen, tried to conform via housecleaning, bridge parties, and a new outfit every spring. My father, who was born into a British-mannered Protestant family in southern Ireland, emigrated to America as a young man and idolized the "melting pot" because at last he fit in. Once in a rare while he recited "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" or told a tale of a leprechaun, but most of the time he was an earnest naturalized American who expected exemplary behavior of his children. My mother was a charming Pollyanna who would not entertain negative sentiments in herself or anyone around her. As their only girl and the baby of the family, I was coddled, yet hardly ever got a chance to be other than excruciatingly good.
My "conform" phase lasted right into adulthood. When I was thirteen, my parents bought a small motel near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and I spent most of my teen years helping them make beds and clean rooms. I did not date until I went to college -- Gettysburg College, all of seven miles from home. it was the height of the sixties, and I grew my hair long, but eschewed pot, protests, and "happenings." Instead, I married a preacher's son who was himself conforming by studying for the ministry. Within a few years I was Rev. Springer's wife, complete with offspringers, living in a country parsonage in southern York County, PA.
Here beginneth the "go crazy" phase.
Because I had never been allowed any negative emotions, I began to hear "voices" in my head. First they whispered "divorce" (not permissible), and later they hissed "suicide". They scared me silly. I couldn't sleep; images of knives and torture floated in front of my eyes even during the daytime; something roared like an animal inside my ears; my wrists hurt; I saw blood seeping out of the walls; panic jolted me like a cattle goad out of nowhere. Is it necessary to add that I was clinically depressed? The doctor gave me Valium and sent me to a shrink. The shrink took me off the Valium and told me I had a problem with anger. (No duh.) The next doctor zombied me on the numbing antidepressants which were available at that time. The next shrink said I had an adjustment problem. And so on, for several years, during which I somehow managed to stay alive, take care of my kids, handle the vagaries of my husband, sew clothing and grow vegetables to get by financially, cook, can preserves, show up at church, do mounds of laundry and publish "The White Hart" and "The Silver Sun"--yet not one of the doctors of shrinks ever suggested that I might be a strong person, let alone a writer. All of them were intent on "helping" poor little me "adjust" to being a housewife, mother, and pastor's wife.
Eventually I became resigned to the fact (as I perceived it) that I was an evil, sinful person with horrible things going on inside my head, and I stopped trying to fix me. I stopped going to doctors or therapists. Somehow I found courage--or desperation--to stop trying to conform or adjust or live a role.
"I am going to start taking an hour or two first thing in the morning to do my writing," I said to my husband.
"Fine," he said. He had reached the point where he would agree with whatever to humor the neurotic wife; to him it was just another of my brain farts. But to me it was the most important sentence I ever spoke. With that statement I stopped being a housewife who sometimes stole time to write, and I started being a writer.
Conform, go crazy--or become an artist.
By becoming a writer--by becoming who I truly was--I became well.
It was so simple. Although it did take years, of course; it takes a long time for good things to grow. Trees. Books. Me. Odd thing about books; they not only nourish growth but show it happening. In "The Black Beast, The Golden Swan" and many other of my early novels, you can see me dealing with the yang/yin nature of good and evil, struggling to accept my own shadow. In "Chains of Gold" and "The Hex Witch of Seldom" I start writing as a woman, no longer identifying only with male main characters. In a number of children's books I come to terms with my own childhood. And in "Apocalypse"--whoa, what a fierce, dark fantasy novel, the first thing I wrote after my income from writing enabled my husband to leave the ministry. I hadn't thought of myself as repressed when I was a pastor's wife, but obviously something broke loose when I shed that role. "Larque on the Wing"--whoa again, another breakthrough book that spiraled straight out of my muddled middle-aged psyche and took me places I'd never dreamed were in me.
It's been a long time since those days when I thought I was an evil person. I know better now, and I love and trust me even to the extent of writing "Fair Peril"--a more perilous novel than I knew at the time, interfacing all too closely with my life. Written two years before the fact, it foresees my husband's infidelity and my divorce. The most painful irony I've ever faced is that once I gained my selfhood, I lost my lifelong partner. He had supported me through episodes that would have sent most men screaming and running, but once I became well and strong, he transferred his loyalty to a skinny, neurotic waif all to similar to the young woman I once was. After supporting him through twenty-seven years of stinky socks, automotive yearnings, miscellaneous foibles, and the career change that put him where she could cry on his shoulder, I found this a bit hard to take. But I wouldn't go back to being Ms. Pitiful. Not for anything.
Now married to a rather remarkable second husband, after living 46 years in Pennsylvania I moved in 2007 to the Florida panhandle, where I spent a year living in a small apartment above the aforementioned husband's hangar in an exceedingly rural (swamps, egrets, snakes and alligators) airport. Now we have a real house about a mile from the airport on higher ground featuring tremendously tall longleaf pine trees with rattlesnakes and scorpions underneath them. Life is an adventure and I mean that sincerely.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nancy Springer Does it again,
By
This review is from: Secret Star (Hardcover)
Tess Mathis lives with her her disabled stepfather. She is so poor they have no electricity and very little food. When a young man named Kamo comes to town asking her questions it stirs up memories of a past Tess would rather forget. Is Kamo a bad guy like his facial scars and attitude would have you believe? Or is he really a friend in disguise?
I loved Nancy Springer books for adults, and decided to read some of her childrens' books on a whim and I found this book enjoyable. While I found it somewhat implausible that a child like Tess would live in such abject poverty without social services becoming involved, I like the characters of Kamo and Tess and her stepfather. Well worth the read for the for adults and teens alike.
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