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Searching... Monmouth Public Library | J Fic Rivers, K. 2016 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Longing to be one of the popular girls in her new town, Kammie Summers has fallen into a well during a (fake) initiation into their club. Now Kammie's trapped in the dark, counting the hours, waiting to be rescued. (The Girls have gone for help, haven't they?)
As hours pass, Kammie's real-life predicament mixes with memories of the best and worst moments of her life so far, including the awful reasons her family moved to this new town in the first place. And as she begins to feel hungry and thirsty and light-headed, Kammie starts to imagine she has company, including a French-speaking coyote and goats that just might be zombies.
Karen Rivers has created a unique narrator with an authentic, sympathetic, sharp, funny voice who will have readers laughing and crying and laugh-crying over the course of physically and emotionally suspenseful, utterly believable events.
Author Notes
Karen Rivers 's books have been nominated for a wide range of literary awards and have been published in multiple languages. When she's not writing, reading, or teaching other people how to write, she can usually be found hiking and taking photos in the forest that flourishes behind her tiny old house in Victoria, British Columbia, where she lives with her two kids, three dogs, and three birds. Find her online at karenrivers.com and on Twitter: @karenrivers.
Reviews (6)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 4-6-As the new girl in town, 11-year-old Kammie will do almost anything to be accepted by popular girls Candy, Mandy, and Sandy. She allows herself to be led and bullied by the unlikable threesome until something awful happens. Kammie's told to stand on the cover of an abandoned well, and it collapses, trapping her in the well. Over the next several hours, Kammie talks to and about Candy, Mandy, and Sandy; imagines scenes about her dysfunctional family, the death of her dog, and zombie goats in the bottom of the well; and ponders her predicament. Narrator Michele O. Medlin brings preteen Kammie, the obnoxious popular girls, and other supporting players to life as Kammie veers from one tangentially related thought to another. Medlin also captures Kammie's emotions, from anger to sadness to fear. VERDICT A great offering that can begin conversations on bullying, ethics, death, and many other topics. ["An unusual story with uncommonly truthful emotions": SLJ 1/16 review of the Algonquin book.]-Ann Brownson, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Rivers (Finding Ruby Starling) adheres to the advice that fiction writers "give their characters trouble" in this psychological horror story. Over a day and night trapped in a well, Kammie Summers, 11, recounts a horrific year. After her father's incarceration for a heinous crime, a beloved relative dies of cancer, and a bus kills the family dog outside their New Jersey home (which the bank is repossessing). The Summers relocate to "Nowheresville," Texas, exchanging a life of plasma-screen TVs and horseback-riding lessons for a trailer where Kammie shares a bedroom with a brother who doesn't like her anymore. Asthmatic Kammie doles out the details of her downward mobility while the mean girls who tricked her into falling into the well look down and laugh. Rivers writes intense scenes of hallucinatory prose as the sky darkens, and oxygen deprivation causes Kammie to imagine dead goats beneath her feet, spiders attacking her legs, and the company of a French-speaking coyote. The stream-of-consciousness narration recalls Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," but claustrophobics will probably want to read something else. Ages 10-13. Agent: Jennifer Laughran, Andrea Brown Literary Agency. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Relocating to podunk Texas was intended to be a new start for Kammie Summerss family, but Kammies depressed mother must work two jobs, Kammie fights with her brother, and true friends are elusive. Hanging out with The Girls (popular Mandy, Candy, and Sandy, whose drawls are more stereotypical Valley Girl than Texan) leads to mean-spirited hazing, landing Kammie in a well. The Girls take off, supposedly to get help, and the narrative shifts between the confines of the well and Kammies memories (both fond and painful) of family, including her fathers imprisonment and her grandmothers death. Medlins youthful voice alternates between a fearful tone when relating Kammies present, trapped situation and a calm, humorous tone when Kammie is recalling the past. In both cases, the characters voice is the centerpiece of a story of loss, betrayal, and transformation. ernie cox (c) Copyright 2016. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Kammie's fallen down an abandoned well, beyond the reach of the three mean, popular girls who got her into this life-threatening mess. Her perilous situation is really the culmination of a series of calamities that she gradually reveals in her unforgettable stream-of-consciousness monologue. First, her father was convicted of embezzling money from his employer, a charitable organization that provided wish fulfillment for critically ill children. She, her struggling mother, and her angry older brother moved from their foreclosed New Jersey home to a Texas trailer to be near her father's prison. Her dog was hit by a bus. Her grandmother died. The misfortunes have piled one on top of another. Striving to find a new self and a few friends, Kammie let herself be victimized by the nearly interchangeable Kandy, Mandy, and Sandy, who haveperhaps intentionallyset her up for the fall into the well and then abandoned her there. With so many horrors crowding into her 11 years, Kammie's tale should be a tragedy. Instead, it's a brilliantly revealed, sometimes even funny, exploration of courage, the will to live, and the importance of being true to oneself. The catastrophe draws readers in, and the universality of spunky Kammie's life-affirming journey will engage a wide audience. Moving, suspenseful, and impossible to put down. (Fiction. 10-16) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Not much is going right for Kammie. Before she moved to what she refers to as Nowheresville, Texas, her father was convicted of embezzlement, and she was ostracized at school. Now poor and disheartened, she decides to remake herself and seeks out a cadre of her new school's queen bees. That's how she wound up with her hair chopped into short hunks and stuck in an old well. With no guarantee the girls who lured her to the spot will go for help, Kammie reflects on the ways things went wrong and dreams about what she would like life to ideally be. As night falls and depleting oxygen leads her to loop through her feelings, the abandoned girl is finally discovered. Readers will be eager to find out if she is rescued at last, and if she manages her life better in the incident's aftermath. A different sort of bullying book, with the spotlight never leaving the victim, it should strike a chord with its tween audience.--Cruze, Karen Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ANYONE OF A certain age remembers the little girl who fell into a well in Texas in the late 1980s. Workers spent three days trying to free her. It was the stuff of parent nightmares. Coming at the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle, the story was covered night and day, causing our child imaginations to go wild: Was she going to die? How did she go to the bathroom? The event was, of course, soon turned into a TV movie. Karen Rivers makes a similarly trapped girl the sole narrator of her darkly humorous new middle-grade novel, "The Girl in the Well Is Me." Eleven-year-old Kammie has fallen down a well in Nowheresville (her term), Tex., and remains stuck there while the three mean girls she was trying to impress humiliate her from above. Like a juvenile version of the film "Buried," the book opens as she finds herself in a dark hole after a dare. And there she remains, stuck, for almost the entire story. We only see what she sees, hear what she hears and bear witness to the thoughts that swirl through her preteen head, such as: "I wonder if heaven is real? I hope so. If it's not, this whole life thing is going to have felt like a major ripoff." Luckily, as Kammie's mind wanders wildly from lack of oxygen, the story opens up as she flashes back to the events leading up to her potential demise. We find out that she is a recent transplant to Texas, that her mother is struggling to hold down two jobs and that her older brother is out of control. All of this is because her dad has been convicted of embezzling funds from a Make-a-Wish-type foundation. His absence and the revelations of what he did send Kammie's life on the downward path that has ended in the well. As awful as Kammie's situation down there is, it generates many honest and forthcoming moments. Recollections of an old woman, whose granddaughter died and couldn't get her final wish because of Kammie's dad, bring shame to Kammie because she feels guilty by association. As night falls, Kammie begins to realize just how devastating her father's betrayal was to her mom and how helpless she must feel now. Kammie remembers wondering if death might be easier on everyone and contemplating how to "un-be." These reflections in the heart of darkness (both literally and figuratively) are where the story hits its stride. However, first we must undergo the setup, which at times feels oddly false and disconnected. As the girls make fun of Kammie for falling in the well, then take their sweet time before getting help, it's hard to believe that even the meanest of mean girls wouldn't recognize the gravity of the situation right away. Other story elements feel just as implausible, like a teacher who leads an ethics discussion about Kammie's jailed father in front of her entire class. Or when Kammie fills a boy's Coke with salt, sending him to the hospital with kidney failure after he somehow drinks the whole thing. These feel like forced, unnecessary details. IT'S IN THE quiet moments when Kammie is alone with her thoughts - which become surreal hallucinations - that the book comes alive and feels original and truthful. Fantastical goat zombies, spider crabs and coyotes keep her company, sometimes speaking in French. An image of her father digging out of jail and into her hole to rescue her turns into a revealing conversation with him. Having survived a night of woozy self-reflection and realizing that her dream of becoming one of the popular girls was shallow and misguided, Kammie begins to come to grips with her life, amusingly: "If I die, they'll put teddy bears at the top of the well. They'll sprinkle flower petals down on me and the goats like rain, and the fleas will catch them and eat them, and the coyote will say, wisely, 'These girls were never your friends !' And I will nod, sagely, in my white ghostly dress and say, 'Yes, yes, yes, but now I can haunt them.'" That would have been an interesting turn of events. But eventually comes the realization that Kammie doesn't want to die. A ray of hope appears. Perhaps she and her family are more resilient than she thinks. Maybe they can climb out of their current situation. Anything is better than remaining stuck in a hole forever. G. NERI is the author of many books for young people, most recently the middle-grade novel "Tru and Nelle," about the childhood friendship of Truman Capote and Harper Lee.