Author: Sheri Reynolds
Publisher: Three Rivers
Rating: WORTHY!
Here's another example of what you get when you put your fine novel into the hands of a publisher: the girl in the cover illustration doesn't even remotely represent the character in the novel. Quite the contrary; the girl on the cover is an open insult to the main character, and I can't honestly believe that the illustrator even read the novel to come up with crap like that. This is why I self-publish!
I highly recommend this novel.
Kendra Elaine Lugo, universally known as Kenny, is almost eighteen. She lives in a sea-side town in a run-down home, which isn't, strictly, her home. Her mother is dead and her father is in prison. She lives with her "aunt" who isn't related to her, and so she also lives in constant fear that she's going to be thrown out the minute she turns eighteen. She's mildly sexually abused by her older non-brother Tim-Tim in the way kids sexually explore one another, but in general, very broadly speaking her life isn't too bad considering everything.
Unfortunately, Kenny is one of the most intriguing, scary, endearing, frightened, desperate, lovable characters I've ever encountered in a novel and she has more neuroses than a medical dictionary. When a girl is killed next door, in the adjoining home of a old guy who is potentially a pedophile, Kenny takes a morbid interest. Jarvis killed Clara Tinsley with a shotgun blast when she climbed into his house with her friend Rhonda, both of whom mistakenly thought this was their rented beach property where they were vacationing. They had been given the wrong address, and couldn't find the key. It was late at night so they went in through the window.
Kenny often behaves as though she's much younger than her 17 years. She has flights of fearful fancy about her life and her future. She obsesses on dead Clara, frequently imagining bits of her wounded body lying hidden in crevices in Jarvis's house, or imagining her as a friend, still alive. She obsesses on Clara's friend Rhonda, and on Clara's red car. Kenny obsesses on her own body and on her breasts, and on her period. She wears cycling shorts and several layers of underwear and presses her small breasts down even smaller by wearing a cut-off pair of pantyhose upside down, with a hole cut in the crotch for her head. She decided to make herself appear as boyish as possible to dissuade Tim-Tim from hitting on her.
Kenny is industrious and inventive, and imaginative and quirky as hell. She has way more fears and fantasies than any ordinary girl ought, which makes her extraordinary in my book (and in Reynolds's book, too!). I love the way she thinks and the way her thoughts run on disjointed and simultaneously oddly congruous. I love how inventive she is and how her mind works, and work it does - overtime, too! She's refreshing and brilliant and well worth getting to know, which is why it's so saddening to see how undervalued she is.
Kenny starts cleaning out and redecorating the crappy garden shed in Aunt Flo's back yard because she thinks she will have to move out there or be homeless when she turns eighteen. Okay, I confess: I adore Kenny. But I think Kenny is gay, so my adoration is as far as this can go! Even at the end of the novel I still had no take on Kenny in this regard, and that's fine, because she doesn't want to be pinned down and she deserves to be free, but I have to confess I had hoped for a bit more than I got the more I read this.
Having said that, I did get wa-ay more than I hoped for in this novel before I began it, and that's why it was one of the very few novels I've read since I started this blog that I was willing to class as a 'WORTHY' even before finishing it. That's because it's so brilliantly done that I didn't care if the ending sucked: it's worth reading anyway. And the ending didn't suck. I loved Kenny, I loved the way this was written. I loved the stops and starts and spurts and stream of consciousness writing. I urge you to read this and I am looking for other Sheri Reynolds novels. Well, not as we speak, but you know what I mean! Very WORTHY indeed.
