Customer Reviews

Tomato Girl

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I have been avoiding writing a review about the book Tomato Girl, by Jayne Pupek, because that would mean it was time for me to move on to something else. I did not want to move on. I love loved loved this book! I read it once (in one day), but then the following day I went back and placed sticky notes on at least 10 pages, so that I could reread some of the haunting passages again, and keep them for the future.

Tomato Girl is about Ellie Sanders, an 11-year old girl growing up in a dysfunctional family. It is not an easy read, but I found myself anxiously waiting to turn each page. It is a heartbreaking account of mental illness and how it can tear apart a family. The prologue is only one page, and yet it made my jaw drop open.

FROM THE PROLOGUE.............Jars line my cellar shelves. Some are filled with fists of yellow-veined tomatoes. Others hold small onions and chopped leeks, white pearl onions floating in an opaque sea. Sometimes the light falls on a jar of boiled quail or the slick dark meat of a rabbit. There are unexpected moments when I see the slit of an infant's mouth, or the curl of a tiny fist behind the glass, and I run up the steps, back into the open light of sky...........I need to tell what I remember, I need to tell the story of a girl whose world unraveled like a torn scarf.............

What I loved best about this book (well there are so many things to love), but especially that the story is told through 11-year old Ellie's eyes, and how she views the world she lives in. There are loads of clues the reader will pick up on, but naive Ellie does not (at least not initially). Ellie is so genuine; you just want to sweep her away ......off to a normal childhood as she is faced with far too many difficult adult issues. The novel takes place in 1969 in a fictional town in Virginia, so there is a whole racial element to the story as well.

I thought it was brilliant how the heart of the story takes place during Easter week. There is a part when Ellie thinks about her "God Promises"....so touching. There are so many beautiful passages and analogies in this book. I do not want to quote any more as I don't want to spoil it for others.

I have read over 100 books in 2008 and this is my favorite so far. It is an amazing debut novel. I look forward to more books by this talented author. PLEASE read this book; it is one book that will resonate long after the final page has been turned.

Oh boy! Another winner from Algonquin Press. Tomato Girl keeps readers turning pages till way too late into the night. From the outset, you just know all of eleven-year-old Ellie's hard work to heal her mother, reform her father, and banish the tempting teen-aged Tomato Girl, are unrealistic and doomed. It's all too much for the eleven-year-old child, the only person in her family who seems to have her head on straight, to manage on her own - and fears of the obvious consequences prevent her from seeking outside help. Against insane odds, Ellie valiantly struggles onward, carrying mesmerized readers along with her.

Writing an entire novel in the voice of a child is difficult, but for the most part first-time author Jayne Pupek manages to maintain the tone, awareness, and vocabulary of a pubescent child of the South in a manner that is consistent and authentic.

Kudos to both Pupek and her publisher for bringing Tomato Girl to fruition.

Jayne Pupek can write! Tomato Girl is a beautiful novel related by an eleven-year old narrator, Ellie, whom I loved from the moment she admitted "I can't tell them about Mama's moods, or how she keeps Baby Tom in a jar." I was captivated by her story, and so curious to learn it that I had trouble setting the novel down.

Though young, Ellie is a perceptive narrator, and I enjoyed meeting the adults in the book through her eyes. I saw how and why she adored her father, though his actions were irresponsible, sometimes cruel, and sometimes criminal. Her mother suffers from madness, and as I watched her condition deteriorate through her daughter's eyes, I felt my concern intensify into something approaching terror. Ellie is a child forced to shoulder burdens that even an adult--and especially the adults in the story--have trouble carrying. I couldn't help but feel compassion for her. I wanted things to work out for her; I was completely sucked into her world.

The story is very dark at times, but the book remains hopeful, often because Ellie brings a light to the events through her unwavering love for her family and her childish innocence. The characters are complex, the setting well described, the voice one you will not likely forget. Tomato Girl is a wonderful debut novel by a writer who knows her craft. I'm already looking forward to Pupek's next book.

From the very first page, I was drawn into this book. While there are a few things worth mentioning as a critique, I feel the book has earned a discussion of the good points first.

I can understand why some readers would not enjoy this book. It is devastatingly truthful and honest. Ellie is surrounded by a family full of illness, pain, frustration, and desperation. I was so emotionally connected to Ellie that near the end of the book, I felt...literally felt the weight of emotional strain that she was under. Perhaps that is the most powerful aspect of the book for me. And perhaps that is why there are some readers who do not enjoy this book. The emotions here were thick and palpable. I certainly could not bear to have every book that I read be this heavy, but I am glad that I read Tomato Girl.

The prose is beautiful. I am not surprised at all to see that Pupek is also a poet. She writes with the ease and grace of a writer who sees the beauty in the terrible. And there is hidden beauty in this book. There is redemption in the grace and love Ellie receives from other people in the neighborhood and there is beauty in the unwavering attachment Ellie feels toward her parents despite their inability to return that same quality of love. There is even beauty in the struggle that Ellie's parents face in escaping the quagmire of mental illness. Pupek delivers the small details that children pay attention to but that adults ignore or forget. Details such as Ellie's constant awareness of her surroundings....the noises of her mother walking upstairs, the water rushing through the pipes, the "electric" in the air that foretells the mood her mother is in. These are telling details that add depth to the story, especially in the way that it portrays Ellie as the hypersensitive and observant daughter of a mentally ill mother. These details are not simply thrown in for the sake of adding details (I sometimes find that Alice Hoffman slips into description for the sake of description); these details mean something to the story.

What I find to critique about the book is that Ellie felt a bit young for eleven to me, especially since this is not her mother's first "episode". Yet, there really is a wonderful play in the innocence versus independence that she faces. Perhaps I am reading this as a 2008 reader who exists in a world where mental illness is more easily discussed. Perhaps the repression of the 1960s would account for this innocence, but I am not sure. Also, a lot happens to Ellie in a relatively short amount of time. It seems as though everything that could go wrong does in the span of Easter Break. Honestly, because I was so invested in the story, I barely gave it a second thought, but it is worth mentioning.

As for the believability of Clara's character and her use of magic, some readers may find this too abrupt and farfetched. I found it to be an emotional reprieve. There is sometimes something inherently haunting, mysterious, and mystical with people who suffer mental illness. I think the "magic" Clara uses and the connection she feels with Julia is just another layer of the truth of this novel that those who are unfamiliar with the struggle would not believe or accept. It is a world of superstitions, signs, and readings. Ellie, Clara, and Julia all "read" the world in both similar and dissimilar ways, but each has its own bit of magic and mystery.

I do regret that I do not know more of the adult life that Ellie lived. The only glimpse that we see of that is in the prologue as she sits in the basement and writes her story. I care for this character and need to see how she adjusted. I am extremely glad that I read this novel, and I am extremely excited about Pupek's future works. I do not feel that the back cover blurb/summary gives the story justice, as it focuses on the chalk door that Ellie draws to help herself cope. The blurb makes the door seem like a much bigger part of the story, where as it is only mentioned at the tale end of the novel. I much prefer the actual use of the door as a part of Ellie's coping in the end of the story as opposed to the suggestion on the cover that it is something she utilizes while in the thick of the story.

This was a great read and I highly recommend it to those who brave the emotional wave associated with facing the harsh, yet truthful realities of life. There is definitely a reward for the journey.

"I'm the girl they found standing on the table. The girl who traced the cracks in the wall with her mother's blood."

How we hope little Ellie will come through the dark places of her 11 years of life whole again, as whole as one might expect from the insanity she has survived. We want to believe. Throughout the entire novel, "Tomato Girl," author Jayne Pupek's first, we have been holding our breath with that hope. A former social worker, Pupek has, after all, described this little girl and the wrenching abuse surrounding her at every turn to such effect that we feel almost as if we share that life.

It is a deeply uncomfortable place to be. But Pupek has not meant us to be comfortable. Far from it. We have only that shred of hope that in the very first page, we are invited to read the notebook in which Ellie writes as a form of therapy. That means--Ellie has survived long enough to even get to therapy. Even as she sits in the cellar writing among the glass jars of pickled tomatoes, some of which begin quite eerily to look like the face of a pickled fetus.

One of those pickled objects had been. Baby Tom, her stillborn brother, had been in one of those jars because his mother, Ellie's mother, couldn't bear to part with him. And if that was not unbearable enough, consider scenes of a mother gone mad with some inner torment, taunted by a husband who is not only sleeping with a teenage girl, not so very much older than Ellie, but has even brought that girl into their home. To live. With him. Moving out of his marital bed into the sewing room. One can feel the palpable madness swirling off the written page like an evil vapor. Oh, the torments we inflict one upon the other ...

Ellie observes all of this with the hopeful heart and naïve eyes of a young girl. Since the book is written in first-person narrative, we sense far more quickly than Ellie does exactly what it is that she is seeing. There's a Lolita thing going on here. A brewing pedophilia. A middle-aged man sinking into perversion and temptation, leaving despair and madness in his wake. Ellie can only wonder why Daddy talks so long at the hardware store, where he is a long-time clerk, with the "tomato girl," who brings her crops of reddened, plump fruit to sell. Ellie sees the way Daddy's eyes linger overlong. That he sometimes touches the girl. That the girl touches him, and then, Ellie glimpses a quick kiss, and she struggles to understand. Tess, the tomato girl, comes from an abusive home, too. Daddy later tries to explain away his growing obsession with the primping teen girl--a cute blonde with too much make-up and earrings that dangle to her bare shoulders, snapping gum and paging through women's magazines, oh so teen--by telling Ellie he is taking Tess in to save her from her abusive father. As if he were somehow saving one girl from an abusive father while inflicting it upon his own daughter. Oh, the power of rationalization ...

Tess has occasional epileptic seizures, and while she is so incapacitated, her father has indeed taken, shall we say, advantage. Pupek develops here with expertise the mind games men play when they want their piece of female flesh. Tess's father manages to tell himself he has the right, she's his girl. Ellie's father manages to paint himself a hero in his own eyes, bringing the teen into his own bed, under his own roof, insisting upon the compassion of his wife and young daughter. While his wife spirals into a demented and suicidal state--she can't be fooled--Ellie, like most any child, dotes on her father and works and works to please him, to remain in the circle of his wandering eye, daily forgiving him, even as her understanding grows. She needs to forgive him. For her own sanity. This is her Daddy. And he does, after all, keep telling her how he loves her. How he needs her to be good. To be kind to sweet Tess. And the boundaries continue to be pushed farther and farther.

As such scenarios must, they eventually end in a splash of unspeakable suffering and an explosion of violence. There is a murder, there is a suicide, there is more than one emotional breakdown, and there is, in the center of it all, little Ellie, trying desperately to hold an unraveling world together. No one survives intact. By conclusion, the reader is exhausted with emotion, sighing with relief at one's own saner world, but the realization remains: such things happen. Every day. In more and more homes, and perhaps even in the one next door. As our family protective services agencies are near bursting with cases of abuse, too many still going unreported, and domestic violence is on the increase, and values fall by the wayside in how we treat those in our primary relationships in pursuit of baser pleasures ... the story of Ellie and Tess, the tomato girl, may grow as common as tomatoes.

Pupek, also a published poet, has made a worthy contribution with her first novel. Not only as a literary accomplishment, but also a social one.

~Zinta Aistars for The Smoking Poet, Fall 2008

While by no means a feel good story, I enjoyed reading this book. This is the tale of a dysfunctional family as seen through the eyes of sweet, naive, young Ellie, who wants nothing more than a normal childhood. She blames herself for all that has gone wrong, but never seems to give up hope that things could come together. I think the author does a wonderful job at capturing the emotions of an eleven year old girl. I wanted to reach in and scoop the child right up and bring her home. I had little sympathy for the other characters, I tried to feel sorry for Ellie's mother, but just didn't. A classic example of how children have unconditional love for their parents.

This is the story of a family, a girl, a mother and a father who in a perfect world would have lived happily ever after, but not in Tomato Girl. Pupek does not cut corners or try to make life sound pretty or at all innocent. Ellie Sanders is a young girl, a preteen sweetie who tries her hardest to learn her mama's moods, act kind, and not be selfish. She feels it is because of her selfishness that bad things turn into worse things. Her mama is there for her some days, and others she tries to hurt herself, she tries to hurt others or just is not functional enough to have even the slightest common sense about life. Ellie and her father try to care for Julia, Ellie's mother, but the strains become heavier and heavier.

After a tragic accident she will never be the same, darkness has set into their home, because of Julia and Ellie will do her best to cope while it just won't go away. Then comes Tomato girl, a pretty teen who is broken herself and yet Ellie's father lusts after her. Ellie is torn between wanting to please her father and her feelings of hatred towards the Tomato girl. All she wishes is that they could get rid of the tomato girl and become the family that they once were, before the sadness set in, before life went wrong.

As much as I just couldn't put this book down, as well as it was written, and as true as the situations are to others who have lived in the midst of dysfunction and mental illness, it was seriously hard to read about. I loved Ellie and that is what made me stick to it, her voice is strong, she is no coward and she is left to take care of her mother out of love, yet she fears for her mother's life and her own. Fate begs her to grow up way before time, and then she will need to learn to un-grownup.

I have mixed feelings because it was hard for me to read, all the severity of the plot, and what was done to the characters, but still the writing was superb, the characters were true and Ellie, oh Ellie...she was brilliantly written and personified as that individual inside all of us who tries, and then tries harder- life gave her a truckload of lemons and she scrambled to get on top of the pile to start the process of lemonade. There is no way I can't recommend it, really there isn't. I think this would be a perfect book for so many, those who carry burdens, teachers, parents, counselors- really anyone who works with teens or kids. I recommend that you grab a copy and a warm blanket and have at it!

This is a great book with such detailed characters. I could not put it down! I read it & then reread it! Simply fabulous!

Tomato Girl deals with difficult subject matter - mental illness, abuse, racial issues and criminal activity - but Pupek weaves a beautifully written story. The characters are so real you quickly become absorbed with their world and their story.

Written from the point of view of 11 year old Ellie Sanders, you instantly fall in love with the heart-wrenching tale of this poor little girl. You feel her pain, as well as her hopes and dreams.

The story takes place during the early 1960s in a rural town in Virginia. Julia Sanders is a beautiful, but troubled, wife to Rupert and mother to Ellie. All of Ellie's life, her mother has suffered from some sort of mental illness, many times requiring sedation. While pregnant with a second child, Julia suffers a deplitating fall, resulting in the need for someone to help around the house.

Rupert brings home Tess Reed, the teenage farm girl who supplies home-grown tomatoes to be sold in his general store, as a caretaker for his wife and daughter. It soon becomes clear Rupert is having an affair with Tess. Almost from the instant Tess comes to live in the Sanders' home, a cascade of horrible events changes the family forever.

Throughout the book we watch Julia deteriorate further into a delusional world of her own. We see Rupert transfer all his love and attention away from his daughter and wife, and onto the teenage tomato girl. And most saddly of all, we watch Ellie deparately trying to hold her family together, all the while holding on to deep, dark family secrets. Ellie is forced to bare burdens that would cripple most adults. I felt so much love and empathy for this poor little girl, praying she would finally have the happy life she deserved.

Although Pupek has written a truly dark story, Ellie is full of hope and unconditional love for her family. The tangled lives of all the characters is truly complex, but Ellie's voice keeps the story from becoming too difficult to read.

I have read over 100 books this year, and Tomato Girl is in the top 5. This is an unforgettable book from a first time author, and I look forward to reading more of Pupek's work in the future. She has a talent I'm sure we will all be hearing more about.

TOMATO GIRL by Jayne Pupek was one of the hardest books for me to get through, but it's also my favorite book this year. It will pull at your heart, make you smile, choke you up and make you cry, but mostly it will make you mad. It's one of those books that breaks your heart, but you can't quit reading.

The story is told in it's entirety by Ellie Sanders, who you will immediately fall in love with. Ms. Pupek is very consistent with her characters and develops them perfectly. Her storytelling is compelling and believable. Even though the subject matter is disturbing, and may not appeal to everyone, I applaud Jayne Pupek for her daring courage in this, her debut novel.

What I liked most about this book is the innocence of Ellie and the constant struggle for her to remain unscathed by what is happening around her that she has no control over. Along with Ellie, my other favorite character was Clara, the `colored' woman who comes into Ellie's life at just the right time. All of the characters of TOMATO GIRL are unique and will stay with me for awhile, but I will never forget Ellie, the strong little girl who suffered so much loss, and wanted nothing more than to have a normal life.

TOMATO GIRL is the kind of book that will stir up a lot of emotions that people will be talking about long after they've read it. Some will love it and some may not, but they will always remember it. For those reasons, it would make the perfect choice for any book club.

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