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Item Barcode | Collection | Call Number | Status | Item Holds |
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Summary
Summary
From Newbery Medalist Jerry Spinelli comes the story of a girl searching for happiness inside the walls of a prison. And don't miss the author's highly anticipated new novel, Dead Wednesday !
Cammie O'Reilly lives at the Hancock County Prison--not as a prisoner, she's the warden's daughter. She spends the mornings hanging out with shoplifters and reformed arsonists in the women's excercise yard, which gives Cammie a certain cache with her school friends.
But even though Cammie's free to leave the prison, she's still stuck. And sad, and really mad. Her mother died saving her from harm when she was just a baby. You wouldn't think you could miss something you never had, but on the eve of her thirteenth birthday, the thing Cammie most wants is a mom. A prison might not be the best place to search for a mother, but Cammie is determined and she's willing to work with what she's got.
"A tapestry of grief and redemption, woven by a master storyteller ....Moving and memorable." -- Kirkus Reviews , Starred Review
Author Notes
Jerry Spinelli was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania on February 1, 1941. He received a bachelor's degree from Gettysburg College and a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University. He worked as an editor with Chilton from 1966 to 1989. He launched his career in children's literature with Space Station 7th Grade in 1982. He has written over 30 books including The Bathwater Gang, Picklemania, Stargirl, Milkweed, and Mama Seeton's Whistle. In 1991, he won the Newbery Award for Maniac Magee. In 1998, Wringer was named a Newbery Honor book.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-8-In 2017, Cammie O'Reilly is an elderly grandmother visiting her childhood home with her 12-year-old granddaughter after half a century away. While the outside still looks like the same "fortress from the Middle Ages," the inside now houses birds, butterflies, and turtles rather than the 200-plus inmates of the Hancock County Prison-where Cammie; her widowed father, the warden; and their prisoner-cum-housekeeper Eloda once lived. In the summer of 1959, when Cammie was about to turn 13, her search for a mother figure became desperate as she looked to Eloda, a storytelling inmate and another child's mother, for maternal connection. Amid American Bandstand, hidden cigarette packs, and visits to the prison yard, Cammie comes of age, saved by the kindness of strangers. Carrington MacDuffie is a fine narrator as the grandmother; although the more mature-voiced casting seems initially obvious, because the vast majority of the narrative belongs to a 12-year-old, MacDuffie's older characterization ultimately feels miscast as young Cammie's story progresses. VERDICT Libraries will likely be better suited to recommending Spinelli's latest on the printed page. ["Sentimental and reflective, this nostalgic story will strike a deeper chord in adults than in middle graders": SLJ 11/16 review of the Knopf book.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
The latest from Newbery medalist Spinelli is a coming-of-age story set in Two Mills, Pa. The story opens with the protagonist Cammie O'Reilly, an elderly grandmother, remembering the summer of 1959, when she was 12 and lived with her father in a house adjacent to the Hancock County Prison, where he was the prison warden. The summer was emotionally treacherous for young Cammie, who was just coming to terms with her mother's death. She spent the dog days inside the prison gates passing the time with the women inmates. Actor MacDuffie performs the first-person retrospective narrative in a soothing but straightforward manner, letting Spinelli's masterful prose take center stage. When the story takes a tragic turn, MacDuffie adds due emotion to her otherwise calm reading, which makes for a powerful ending. Ages 9-12. A Knopf hardcover. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 Breakfast time in the prison. The smell of fried scrapple filled the apartment. It happened every morning. "I could teach you how to do it yourself," she said. "It's simple." "I want you to do it," I said. "You'll be a teenager soon. You'll have to learn someday." "You're doing it," I told her. "Case closed." Her name was Eloda Pupko. She was a prison trustee. She took care of our apartment above the prison entrance. Washed. Ironed. Dusted. And kept me company. Housekeeper. Cammie-keeper. At the moment, she was braiding my hair. "Okay," she said. "Done." I squawked. "Already?" I didn't want her to be done. "This little bit?" She gave it a tug. She was right. I'd wanted a pigtail down the middle, but all my short hair allowed was barely a one-knotter. A pigstub. I felt her leaving me. I whirled. "No!" She stopped, turned, eyebrows arching. "No?" I blurted the first thing that came to mind. "I want a ribbon." Her eyes went wide. And then she laughed. And kept laughing. She knew what I knew: I was anything but a hair-ribbon kind of girl. I sat on the counter stool dressed in dungarees, black-and-white high-top Keds and a striped T-shirt. My baseball glove lay on the other stool. When she had laughed herself out, she said, "Ribbon? On a cannonball firebug?" She had a point on both counts. Cannonball was my nickname. As for "firebug" . . . In school two months earlier we had been learning about the Unami, the Native Americans from our area. This inspired me to make a fire the old-fashioned Unami way. For reasons knowable only to the brain of a sixth grader, I decided to do so in our bathtub. On the way home from school one day, I detoured to the railroad tracks and creek and collected my supplies: a quartz stone, a rusty iron track-bed spike and a handful of dry, mossy stuff from the ground under a bunch of pine trees. I laid it all in the bathtub. And climbed in. Over the mossy nest I smashed and scratched the stone and spike into each other. My arms were ready to fall off when a thin curl of smoke rose out of the nest. I blew on it. A spark appeared. "What are you doing?" said Eloda from the doorway. I glanced up at her--and screamed, because the spark had flamed and burned my thumb. Stone and spike clanked on porcelain. Eloda turned on the shower, putting out the fire and drenching me. When I dried off and changed my clothes, she put Vaseline and a Band-Aid on the burn and told me to tell people I had cut myself slicing tomatoes. Eloda tapped my hand. "Lemme see." I showed her. The burn was just a pale pink trace by now. She took my hand in both of hers. She seemed to hold it longer than necessary. "Number one law," she said. "No more fires," I said. She had made me recite the words every time she changed the Band-Aid. She still made me say it. Then her hands were off me, but I was still feeling her. It was her eyes. She was staring at me in a way that seemed to mean something, but I would not find out what till years later. "Tell you what," she said, breaking the spell. "If you make it to three knots, I'll get you a ribbon." Again she started to leave. Again I blurted, "You're so lucky." Again she stopped. "That's me. Miss Lucky." "I mean it," I said. "You get to have scrapple every day." "You're right," she said. "That's why I decided to live here. I love the scrapple." She walked away. "Stop!" She stopped. She waited, her back to me. "You can't go," I told her. "I have work to do." She stepped into the dining room. "I'm your boss!" I called--and instantly wished I could take it back. I added lamely, "When my dad's not here." Her shoulders turned just enough so she could look back at me. Surprisingly, she did not seem angry. She sighed. "Miss O'Reilly--" I stopped her: "My name is Cammie." "Miss Cammie--" "No!" I snapped. "No Miss. Just Cammie." She stared. "Say it." She kept staring. "Please!" Now she was angry. My name, barely audible, came out with a blown breath: "Cammie." She walked away. This was in mid-June, the fourth day of summer vacation when I was twelve, and I had decided that Eloda Pupko must become my mother. Excerpted from The Warden's Daughter by Jerry Spinelli All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.