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Raggedy Ann Heart Reviewed By Lavanya Karthik of Bookpleasures.com
- By Lavanya Karthik
- Published July 6, 2009
- Childrens & Young Adults
Lavanya Karthik
Reviewer
Lavanya Karthik: Lavanya is from Mumbai, India and is a licensed
architect and consultant in environmental management. She lives in
Mumbai with her husband and six-year old daughter. She loves reading
and enjoys a diverse range of authors across genres.
Author: Heather
McPhaul
Pulisher: Booksurge
ISBN: 1-4196-8627-5
Click Here To Purchase Raggedy Ann Heart
Author
Heather McPhaul has crafted a charming coming of age tale in Raggedy Ann Heart, about a family struggling to get by
in rural West Texas in the 70s.
Twelve year old Lindy
Logan’s life is one long uphill struggle- she is a figure of
ridicule at school, and greatly overshadowed at home by her pretty
kid sister, Jo, who seems to have all their mother’s attention.
Their penury is a source of constant embarrassment to her, and the
reason she has to toil on her father’s farm. Meanwhile,
puberty strikes and Lindy is horrified both at her changing body and
the thoughts in her head that she is convinced make her a bad girl.
Lindy’s charismatic Momma has watched her own dreams of stardom
turn to dust, and struggles to adjust to a life of menial work and
frugality. Her two daughters, as alike as chalk and cheese,
constantly battle for her attention. Then tragedy strikes, and
Momma and the girls are forced to re-examine their lives, and resolve
their issues with each other.
The characters of this book are
an interesting and complex lot – Lindy, with her fixation on
TV sitcoms, and near obsessive hand washing; Jo, with her pretty
face, her imaginary friends and her surprising reputation as a fierce
fighter (Jo the Finisher) at school. Also Momma, a mercurial
woman, struggling to reconcile her dreams with the life she is forced
to lead. She is often shallow and thoughtless, and faces
petty social prejudice from the women in the community, yet has the
strength to offer support to one of them when they fall from grace.
It takes the shadow of illness over her life for her to learn to
value it.
I enjoyed this novel, and its depiction of a
troubled mother- daughter relationship. McPhaul narrates
the exploits of this dysfunctional family with gentle humour
and gives the reader a peek into the difficult, often
terrifying, world of a twelve year old. Lindy reminded me
in some ways of perhaps the most famous tortured tween
in contemporary fiction– Adrian Mole. Much like him, Lindy
is a shy introvert who unerringly lands herself in excruciatingly
embarrassing situations, yet - through her sharp
observations of her friends and relatives, in her disappointing
encounter with the boy she fancies, in her final comprehension of her
sister’s imaginary world- reveals a maturity far beyond her
years.
Despite the humour, Lindy’s struggles to
get her mother’s attention are still very touching, especially as
her Momma’s own responses are far from kind, often echoing her own
rejection by the women she has hoped to befriend. A photograph at the
end of this book suggests that the author may have lived in West
Texas herself as a girl, and the book may be part autobiographical.
Perhaps this explains the careful detail with which she has captured
life and people in the little community that this story is set
in.
This is a story with strong female characters; by
contrast, the men in the book are at best peripheral. Lindy’s
father , for example, never draws the girls’ attention
(or the readers') the way Momma does. He remains a character of
contradictions, a man of literate interests who clearly is out of his
element as a farmer, yet puts the family through hardship in his
attempts at growing cotton. By the end, he seems to recede in the
girls’ lives as a tragic figure , distanced emotionally and
physically from them.
While the pace of the book is
rather slow with an overly long first half, it builds up well
to an end that is far from picture perfect, yet uplifting. A good
read for teenagers and adults alike, about love, family and the
tribulations of growing up.