Customer Reviews

The Sweet In-Between: A Novel

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The Sweet In-Between

I LOVE Sheri Reynolds books. This woman can write a story, spin a yarn, tell you like it is. She is entertaining and down to earth, she knows the human heart, she can make you laugh and make you cry.

We meet Kendra - "Kenny" - who is living with her "Aunt" Glo, who is actually her dad's girlfriend. Her dad is in prison and her mom is dead. Among the starring cast of characters are the children of Aunt Glo -- her sons, Quincy and Tim-Tim and her grandaughter, seven year old Daphne. Daphne's mom, Constance, Aunt Glo's daughter, has taken off and is on the road to destruction. Constance is into heavy drug use so Daphne is being raised by her grandmother. And let's not forget Tim-Tim's girl, Sneaky. She is also a great character and quite an addition to the family. And little Daphne? That girl can cuss like a trucker, all the while playing with her dolls.



Kenny loves her family. She misses her mom and her dad. She hates visiting her dad in prison and tries to get out of going every time they are allowed to visit. She worries about everything, but mostly she worries about Aunt Glo kicking her out when she turns 18. So, she decides to make herself the best person she can be and to always be there for Aunt Glo. She helps around the house, works hard, does whatever Aunt Glo asks/needs her to do, babysits Daphne, trying so hard to prove herself a necessary part of the family.

Kenny also has mixed up feelings regarding her sexuality. She hates her body and binds her chest up daily with Ace bandages, along with wearing her hair super short. She is the target of much bullying and is picked on at school constantly. She refuses to use the ladies room while at school. There is one teacher at her school who sees Kenny for the kind, sweet person she really is and this teacher reaches out to Kenny via a camera and having her assist in working on the yearbook.

The book opens with a murder taking place right next door to Aunt Glo's. Two college-aged girls mistake the other half of the duplex for a home they rented and tragedy strikes. This deeply affects Kenny and everyone else at Aunt Glo's home.

This is a WONDERFUL book. Kenny is one of the best characters I have met in a long time. Kenny is such a caring, loving, giving girl, just trying to do the right thing and love her 'family'. She is so confused and really has no one to turn to and talk with to help her through her many questions about her body and her life. This family is poor and struggling and almost trashy, but they all love and care for each other.

Miss Reynolds writes with such genuis that you can see the mildew and mold growing around the bathtub. You can see the smoothness of the water where the family is fishing. You can see poor Kenny struggling with the Ace bandage that she binds herself with. Such talent! Such a great author! Such a good book!

Miss Reynolds has written other books and they are:

Firefly Cloak
A Gracious Plenty
The Rapture of Canaan
Bitterroot Landing

I have read and enjoyed every single one of her books and that now includes this one. Check out these books and read them all. You will not be sorry!

Thank you!
Pam

The main character in this book, Kendra (Kenny) is immediately likable in her enigmatic way. Her ability to survive and cope under a series of life altering circumstances makes the book a thought provoking page turner. Great/fast read. I loved it.

Sheri Reynolds has a true gift for pulling you into her characters and never letting go. If you can read this book and not ache to hug "Kenny" and tell her everything will be all right, not brace to fight anyone who does her wrong, not yearn to know how she's doing now, then fine character-driven tales are wasted on you.

In Virginia seventeen year old Kendra "Kenny" Lugo fears the near future. Her mom died years ago of cancer and her dad is serving time. She lives with her dad's girlfriend "Aunt" Glo who has two kids of her own (tweener Quincy and teen Tim-Tim) and her seven years old granddaughter Daphne, dumped on her by her oldest child. Glo survives her responsibilities thanks in part to prescription pain killers.

Kenny fears Glo will kick her out of her home once she becomes an adult, which is soon. The teen also struggles with identity issues especially hiding her feminine body. When their alcoholic neighbor Jarvis Stanley accidentally kills a college girl, Kenny obsesses over the deceased as her morbidity makes her believe Glo will kick her to the curb soon. Her plan is to soon become responsible and dependable; Glo will beg her to stay.

Told by the frightened Kenny, THE SWEET IN BETWEEN is a fascinating family drama starring a frightened teen filled with anger, remorse and fear. The rest of Glo's extended family is fully developed characters who enhance the at times subtle and other moments in your face story line. However, this is Kenny' tale as she sadly expects the worse but hopes for the best, which in this case is not being kicked out of the only shelter, albeit a relatively poor one, she knows at a time she wonders why she feels different from girls her age.

Harriet Klausner

I read Rapture of Caanan and was completely enthralled. This book went nowhere and had a nowhere ending. I wasn't sure I was reading the same author. I will not try any of her other books.

Kenny Lugo has lived with her father's girlfriend, "Aunt Glo," ever since her father went to prison for drug dealing and possessing paraphernalia. In the household are Glo's granddaughter, Daphne, and Glo's sons, Quincy and Tim-Tim. Unfortunately, Kenny's mother is dead.

While Kenny's given name is Kendra, she strongly prefers the male nickname, binds her breasts, cuts her hair super short and wears boy's clothes. When she overhears Glo tell a friend that Kenny is "gender confused," Kenny doesn't disagree. She hates the fact of her femaleness and the telltale biological markers that come with it.

Kenny is stressed at school. She is an outsider there and frequently the target of bullying and teasing. The teasing in the ladies' room is so unbearable that Kenny awakens in the middle of the night every night to drink as much water as she can. That way, she uses the bathroom at home in the morning and never has a reason to enter the school restroom.

Kenny worries about her future. Although she enjoys living with Glo, she expects to be left on her own when she turns 18 and the foster checks to quit coming in. Where will she go? What will she do? Can she become so indispensable that Glo won't let her leave? While she has vague plans to become a mechanic, her automotive repair teacher relegates the few girls in the class to the sidelines (the others are the giggling girlfriends of the boys in the class).

Yet there are sweet spots in Kenny's life. She enjoys times at the beach, fishing with the family, and adores little Daphne. Even that love is not uncomplicated, though. Kenny has held tight to a dreadful secret about Daphne, from the time Daphne was a baby. She worries, too, that Daphne's drug-addicted mother will show up and take her.

Into Kenny's rather grim life, a terrible event has dropped. Vacationing girls mistakenly entered the next-door neighbor's home in the middle of the night. Elderly Jarvis Stanley, thinking that intruders were breaking in, shot and killed one of them. The dead girl's friend had been taken to Glo's house to wait for the police. Kenny can't stop thinking about the young victim and her companion, to the point of obsession. She's torn because the woman who rented her vacation home to the girls is largely to blame for this tragedy, since she gave them the wrong address. Yet that same lady hires Kenny to do yard work, giving Kenny a much-needed source of cash.

At school, Kenny skips lunch (and the dreaded social life of the cafeteria). Instead, she hangs out in the yearbook staff workroom. The teacher, Ms. Brady, sometimes assigns her token work, but then gives her a job with the power to change her life, just about the time Kenny develops a goal that she hopes will solve the problem of what will become of her when she turns 18.

Kenny's story makes for a gripping read. Each character is true and real. Kenny is a person who yearns and struggles to grow and change, overcoming what feels like insurmountable odds in a hardscrabble life, making THE SWEET IN-BETWEEN an ultimately uplifting tale that readers won't soon forget.

--- Reviewed by Terry Miller Shannon (terryms2001@yahoo.com)

Growing older Kenny would never have imagined that she would hate being a girl, the desire to be like a boy coming to thick and fast in her life. Her teenage years have been far from peaceful. Since the days of her youth, Kenny has known that she is somehow different, forced to hide from her classmates and to drink copious amounts of water so she doesn't have to go to the toilet at school where's there's no place on earth that's worse than the girl's bathroom. As the breadwinner of Kenny's ramshackle and disparate family, it is her aunt Glo who is forced to shoulder many of the burdens as she tries to support her extended family, Tim-Tim, Quincy, and of course Daphne, her adorable granddaughter and the only thing in this world that keeps her attached to her firstborn Constance who is HIV and who suddenly flew the family coop so many years ago.

While Aunt Glo finds solace looking through her microscope, perusing her little pleasures, and designing her fake fingernails to wear when she goes out dancing, even sometimes taking pills that aren't prescribed for her, Kenny tries to sort through the confusion of her bourgeoning sexuality by walking to the carnival grounds. Thinking that she's a robot who walks around inside a comic book and doesn't even know it, she hides her boyhood by tightening the ACE bandage she's constantly got strapped around her chest. She hates them more than anything, wrapping them as tight as she can stand it hoping against hope that her "t*ts will turn black and fall off in her sleep".

As the days go by, Kenny gets herself involved in a number of projects which fuel Sheri Reynolds' subtle and delicate plot. She takes heart in remaking Aunt Glo's rundown workshop, industriously retiling the floor. But what really gives Kenny a new-found sense of purpose and responsibility is the camera she gets as a present from her kindly teacher Ms. Brady allowing her to photograph her family and also her neighbor Jarvis Stanley. Funnily enough, it is Jarvis most who haunts Kenny's life, the ghost of the dead girl Clara Tinsley, who Jarvis Stanley shot accidentally when they were breaking into his house, her blood, and the brains splattered everywhere, providing constant smell that provides the allegorical background to Kenny's life.

Much of the drama in this novel comes from the small moments of love as Kenny and her extended family act out their various dramas with spirit and a certain bitter-sweet poignancy. Kenny certainly isn't without her fair share of worries, but adding to the confusing mix is Tim-Tim's new girlfriend Sneaky with her "thick black eyeliner, and her curly dark permanent" as she steadily reveals she has a crush on Kenny. But it's not just the wiles of Sneaky that Kenny must deal with, there's also her best friend Wendy Honeycutt, "a frog-eyed girl with her long blonde hair" who confuses Kenny when she tells her that doesn`t agree with her "lifestyle" even as she reaffirms that she will never for a moment judge her.

With worries that if Aunt Glo goes off the deep end, "I'll have no rights to Quin and Daphne at all" there's always the thoughts of the wayward Constance and her HIV to remind Kenny of how bad things can get. Meanwhile, Aunt Glo still hankers to see Kenny's father in person, constantly nagging Kenny to visit him in prison even though he has more or less ruined Kenny's life and left her here a "sicko," and also treated her even less like the son he never had. Constantly the odd girl out, Kenny ultimately comes across as a wise and rather prudent narrator who is never mean-spirited, even when she must come to terms with the challenges of being "different" and face the endless teasing and ribbing from those around her. A rather nostalgic reflection on how life is shaped, this novel is about the patterns of life and how if you navigate them well then everything becomes bearable and everything makes sense. Ironically for Kenny it doesn't seem to be that way at all, for her nothing's predictable. Kenny's battle lines are constantly drawn as she grows older and faces her toughest dilemma yet - that of being a butch girl who is furtively attracted to other girls. Certainly her situation is one that is timeless as it is universal. Reynolds talent is that she is able to lace Kenny's internal and external conflicts with a type of board humor, imbuing her narrative with an innocence and a candor while also showing how familial love can endure and change no matter what the cost. The author writes candidly and delicately, infusing Kenny with a practical kind of maturity as her sensitive protagonist tries to walk in tune to the quiet dramas of life. Mike Leonard December 08.

It only took about ten pages for me to be drawn into the world of the people in this novel, especially the protagonist, Kenny. Reynolds does an excellent job of creating characters who are flawed and wounded but still sympathetic. Kenny is one of the most interesting characters I've seen in a long time. She is capable and strong, and she would do anything for the people she loves, yet at her core she's a scared child who just wants to be protected. I was rooting for her all the way to this book's sweet, satisfying conclusion.

A Gracious Plenty and The Rapture of Canaan by Sheri Reynolds were two of the best books that I've read recently, so I picked up one of Reynolds' other novels, The Sweet In-Between. While this book is beautifully written, I didn't quite get the plot. Maybe it was a little too subtle for me.

Kendra "Kenny" Lugo is a gender-conflicted 17-year-old who has more issues than some people have in a lifetime. Her mother is long dead, her father is in jail for drugs, and she's living with her father's girlfriend, Aunt Glo. Kenny tries everything she can to deny her femininity, and as a result, she gets branded a lesbian and is bullied at school. Aunt Glo has her own problems, trying to raise two sons, a special-needs granddaughter, and Kenny. She has trouble making ends meet in a beach town that is evolving into a beach resort. A college student is murdered by Kenny's neighbor when she mistakes his house for her rental property. Kenny becomes obsessed with the dead girl. She is also fearful that Aunt Glo will make her move when Kenny turns 18 as she will no longer receive a child subsidy for her charge. There are also undertones of sexual abuse. It is obvious that Kenny needs a good therapist, although Aunt Glo only fleetingly ponders getting Kenny help.

Despite everything, there are some good things in Kenny's life. She loves Daphne, Aunt Glo's granddaughter, and serves as a surrogate mother. One teacher, Ms. Brady, reaches out to Kenny and encourages her to join the yearbook. She lends Kenny a camera and teaches her to take photographs. And then there is the beach, which is fascinating and soothing at the same time.

My heart went out to Kenny and she reminded me of the many "different" students I had in my teaching career. "I'm scared to go to the football game, but I don't tell Daphne that. At least at school, there are teachers who sometimes protect you. At extracurricular events, you're just a target for whatever meanness comes your way."

The Sweet In-Between is very depressing throughout, although it ends on an upbeat. But it seems that not all that much happens throughout this story. Maybe I just need a plot with a little more meet.

I liked the characters and the writing. Maybe it's a little too "feel-good" by the end, but I'm a sucker for that sort of thing sometimes. I was drawn into the story immediately, and enjoyed it all the way through. It's an easy read with some depth.