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The Sweet In-Between
Hardback: Crown/Shaye Areheart, $23 (224p) ISBN 978-0-307-39389-0 "The newest and most exciting voice to emerge in contemporary Southern fiction." - San Francisco Bay Guardian "Poignant . . . [Reynolds invests] the brief but powerful drama with pathos, poetry, and, unexpectedly, hope." - People "Tender . . .[a] sweet coming-of-age story, thanks to its young, wise-beyond-her-years, Scout Finch-esque heroine." - Entertainment Weekly "Reynolds moves so smoothly back and forth between the past and the present that her novel feels like a keg of dynamite sitting on a slow-burning fuse . . . as riveting as a fact-paced thriller." - Richmond Times-Dispatch "[Reynolds] is a gifted writer with a deceptively simple style and a keen ear for dialogue." - Boston Globe Bestseller Reynolds (The Rapture of Canaan) delivers again with this story of an embattled teenage girl growing up in a Virginia tidewater town. Kendra "Kenny" Lugo has it tough: her mother is dead, her father is in jail, and she is what others might call gender-confused ("the year before I cut off all my hair and started binding myself up"). Living with her father's girlfriend, Aunt Glo, Kenny is approaching 18 and facing the possibility of being kicked out with a sense of impending doom. When their neighbor, habitually drunk Jarvis Stanley, accidentally kills a college girl, Kenny becomes fixated on the tragedy. Meanwhile, Aunt Glo struggles with painkiller addiction while raising her own kids, 12-year-old Quincy and teenaged Tim-Tim, and her runaway daughter's seven-year-old, Daphne. Kenny makes a fascinating, cagey narrator, revealing an unexpectedly dangerous family dynamic with a matter-of-factness that belies her fear and anger, and Reynolds weds expository memories with Kenny's day-to-day so seamlessly, it looks easy. Simple prose rich with subtext, convincing dialogue and a fascinating protagonist combine to produce a heartstring-plucker that's explicit, tender, sad and hopeful. - Fiction Reviews, Publishers Weekly, 8/25/2008 |
