In the midst of the biggest natural disaster in American history--Hurricane Katrina--15-year-old Summer "Sumbie" Elmwood's two-year-old sister disappears from the hospital after open-heart surgery and Sumbie is the prime suspect. But in the chaos of New Orleans after the storm, no one is looking for just one little girl. Sumbie must find her missing sister and enlists her two would-be boyfriends to help her, hoping against hope that it's not too late.
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Patty Friedmann's most recent appearance on Amazon is with Pick-Up Line, an electronic version of a novel that almost was lost in 2006 in the wake of hurricane Katrina. Pick-Up Line follows her electronic bestseller Too Jewish that also came out from booksBnimble in 2010. She is now back with her darkly humorous literary fiction after two YA novels No Takebacks and Taken Away. Friedmann is the author of A Little Bit Ruined, Side Effects (now Pick-Up Line), Secondhand Smoke, Eleanor Rushing, and Odds, all currently in print from Counterpoint, and of The Exact Image of Mother (Viking 1991) and Too Smart to Be Rich (New Chapter 1988). This year her An Organized Panic took first runner-up out of 406 novel entries in the Faulkner-Wisdom literary competition. In 2001-2002, she was writer-in-residence at Tulane University. Patty has reviewed for Publishers Weekly, Brightleaf, Short Story, and the Times-Picayune; her short stories have appeared in Horn Gallery, Short Story, LaLit, Xavier Review, and elsewhere; and she has had essays in Oxford American, Speakeasy, and New Orleans Review. Stage productions under the direction of Carl Walker are The Accidental Jew and Lovely Rita. She was included in The Great American Writers Cookbook and Christmas Stories from Louisiana in 2003, as well as in the collections My New Orleans in 2005, Intersections in 2006, Life in the Wake and New Orleans Noir in 2007, and Something in the Water in 2011. The manuscript of a new book titled An Organized Panic took second place out of 406 entries in the novel category of the William Falulkner-William Wisdom literary competition in 2012. In 2009 Oxford American included her Secondhand Smoke with Gone With the Wind, Deliverance, and A Lesson Before Dying as one of the 30 Most Underrated Southern Books. Patty is the mother of Esme Roberson and Werner Friedmann II and the grandmother of Summer Roberson and Kennedy and Carmine Friedmann.
Taken Away takes the reader to one of the worst disasters in recent American history: Hurricane Katrina. In real time, author Patty Friedmann shows what it must have been like for a teenager (and her friends) to be trapped in New Orleans during the storm that left over 1,500 dead and nearly 1 million displaced.
Friedmann gives an immediacy to her tale--probably because, as the author's note makes clear, she lived through the storm herself.
The novel's protagonist, Summer Elmwood, is a smart (and smart-ass) girl at a good school who has a few conflicts with her elitist classmates as well as her artsy parents who never left their hippie roots. She has a toddler sister with a heart condition who needs surgery, a best friend who is African Americsn and desperate to fall in love, a boyfriend who isn't quite a boyfriend and a whole lot of teen angst.
Summer feels out of control of her life, which dovetails nicely with how out of control everything gets very quickly as the storm starts to barrel across the Gulf just as Summer's little sister, Amalia, is going under the knife.
As all hell breaks loose in the city and the Elmwood family is about to evacuate, Amalia turns up missing from ICU, which shakes the foundation of the Elmwood family and throws suspicion on Summer.
The tension that ensues as the Elmwoods join the thousands searching for lost loved ones in the midst of catastrophe is palpable. Friedmann captures the moment-by-moment misery, fear and repetitive sense of loss that flooded the city after the levees broke.
Summer is a realistic, believable and likeable character--a 15 year-old with all of the conflicting issues real teenagers have.... Thrust into the worst situation imaginable--a natural disaster of monumental proportions and having her sister go missing and presumed dead---she's torn between her own best intentions and her natural teenaged feelings of jealousy, impatience and need for attention and parental love.
Friedmann captures the sense of daily deprivation that Summer and other Katrina victims had to cope with--things as simple as not being able to bathe (imagine being a teenage girl trying to pursue her crush on a boy without benefit of deodorant, toothbrush or clean clothes!)or flush a toilet or turn on a fan in the sweltering heat. And then there are the homes with marks of the dead bodies on them. And the dead bodies might just include Summer's little sister.
This is one of those smart, literary novels that compels the reader from start to finish. Friedmann begins with a taut, shocking prologue that explains to a youthful reader too young to remember Katrina just how awful it was and jogs the memory of those of us who are old enough to remember those horrifying images all-too-vividly.
Friedmann's novel was a finalist for the 2011 Book of the Year Award for juveline fiction. A superb story with a great protaginist, Taken Away will stay with the reader--teen/tween and adult alike--for some time.--Miranda Kent, Y/A author of The Things Inside, Some Kind of Killing and the Madison McKenna seriesRead more ›
Author Patti Friedmann's writing style and voice are gripping within themselves, but when paired with an exceptional story, the experience becomes a feast of delectable dialog, introspection, description, etc., etc.
I was enthralled by the honesty with which this story is told. That honesty took center stage through gut-wrenching fact and description, sometimes it gushed forth in desperation and misery. A Heartless disaster, heartless circumstances, and heartless individuals all band together to form a almost unbeatable foe in TAKEN AWAY. This story is REAL in every sense. You can't read it and come away untouched. I'm thrilled to have had the chance to read and review this work by author Patti Friedmann. I give this book 5 STARS!
Reviewed by Lynda at Between The Pages blog - [...]
Summer Elmwood's parents don't believe in television, or computers, or cell phones, or air conditioning, or caller ID. They don't believe in evacuation, either - which is how they ended up living in their local Baptist Hospital when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Summer's little sister, Amalia, was having open-heart surgery a week before the storm... but when Summer's family is forced to evacuate, Amalia is gone. Now they're living with shallow, selfish, rich Aunt Sharon, and Summer's family is convinced she hid or murdered Amalia. With a secret cell phone, her best friend Haydn, and a new friend Robert, it's up to her to find her sister.
I had a mixed reaction to this book. On the one hand, the language and several things about drugs and other activities were simply unnecessary. Yes, Summer's parents were strange ex-hippies. Yes, Summer was a 'normal teen.' This doesn't mean a lot of the content really needed to be in there; the story was perfectly fine without it. Another problem I had was the writing; the story is told from Summer's point of view, and her thoughts are often confusing. Half the time you feel like you're a stranger trying to understand a small-town inside joke. Other times Summer just seems fickle or unrealistic. Example: going from 'I love my baby sister and must find her!' to 'I have to find Amalia because my parents won't pay attention to me if I don't.')
On the other hand, the story itself was amazing. It protrays the various facets of the tragedy called Katrina, along with other issues in New Orleans. The events pull you in; whether or not you like or care about Summer's family, something makes you want to know - need to know - if they ever find Amalia.... Depending on your feelings towards the Elmwoods, you also end up wondering what happened to Amalia - did someone take her? murder her? who? why? - and who finds her, if she's ever found - Summer? her parents? one of her friends? the FBI?
For a compelling and honest story about a real-life tragedy, I give this book two and a half stars.
I received this book for free from the author in exchange for this review. All opinions expressed are mine and mine alone.Read more ›
