Idgie Says:
This book strongly reminds me of a few other books I have read over the years - but in a good way. In the way that the children are still children, but they are forced into adult situations that could shatter them but don't. Their voices are strong in the pages and they keep their youthful attitudes while dealing with these issues. In other words, they remain children and not those annoying tiny adults that you find in the pages of novels. They remain in their ages throughout the story.
The novel starts with the girls recovering from the sudden death of their mother, to discovering they will now live with their father, who happens to reside in a tee-pee in a meadow and raises bees. Uh-huh, the child welfare system went along with this. They don't know him that well as he hasn't really been a part of their lives for a while.
Put this interesting living situation together with a murder, voluntary trauma muteness, suspicions, unexpected twists (very unexpected actually) and turns - oh and throw in a few spirits that cling to the girls like puppies - and you have a very interesting read.
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Crooked River by Valerie Geary
(On Sale 10/14/2014)
William Morrow
This book strongly reminds me of a few other books I have read over the years - but in a good way. In the way that the children are still children, but they are forced into adult situations that could shatter them but don't. Their voices are strong in the pages and they keep their youthful attitudes while dealing with these issues. In other words, they remain children and not those annoying tiny adults that you find in the pages of novels. They remain in their ages throughout the story.
The novel starts with the girls recovering from the sudden death of their mother, to discovering they will now live with their father, who happens to reside in a tee-pee in a meadow and raises bees. Uh-huh, the child welfare system went along with this. They don't know him that well as he hasn't really been a part of their lives for a while.
Put this interesting living situation together with a murder, voluntary trauma muteness, suspicions, unexpected twists (very unexpected actually) and turns - oh and throw in a few spirits that cling to the girls like puppies - and you have a very interesting read.
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Crooked River by Valerie Geary
(On Sale 10/14/2014)
William Morrow
With the inventiveness and emotional power of
Promise Not to Tell, The Death of Bees, and After Her, a powerful literary debut about family and friendship, good and evil, grief and forgiveness.
He is not evil. I am not good.
We are the same: broken and put back together again.
Still grieving the sudden
death of their mother, Sam and her younger sister Ollie McAlister move
from the comforts of Eugene to rural Oregon to live in a meadow in a
teepee under the stars with Bear, their beekeeper
father. But soon after they arrive, a young woman is found dead
floating in Crooked River, and the police arrest their eccentric father
for the murder.
I see things no one else does.
I see them there and wish I didn’t. I want to tell and can’t.
Ollie, too, knows that Bear is innocent. The Shimmering have told her so. One followed her home from her mom’s funeral and refuses to leave. Now, another is following Sam. Both spirits warn Ollie: the real killer is out there, closer and more dangerous than either girl can imagine.
Told in Sam and Ollie’s vibrant voices, Crooked River is a family story, a coming of age story, a ghost story, and a psychological mystery that will touch reader’s hearts and keep them gripped until the final thrilling page.