The Silver Star
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3.6 • 7 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
For readers who loved The Glass Castle comes a stunning, heartbreaking novel about an intrepid girl who challenges the injustice of the adult world.
It is 1970. 'Bean' Holladay is twelve and her sister Liz fifteen when their mother, a woman who 'flees every place she's ever lived at the first sign of trouble', takes off to find herself. She leaves the girls enough money for food to last a month or two, but it's not long before Bean and Liz board a bus from California to Virginia, where their widowed Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that has been in the family for generations.
Once they've arrived, money is tight, so Liz and Bean start working for Jerry Madox, foreman of the mill in town, a big man who bullies workers, tenants and his wife. Bean adores her whip-smart older sister, inventor of wordgames, reader of Edgar Allan Poe, non-conformist. But when school starts in the autumn, it is Bean who easily adjusts and makes friends, and Liz who becomes increasingly withdrawn. And then something happens between Liz and Maddox...
'Tragic and comic at the same time... an outrageous story, one that will break your heart' Sunday Independent
'There isn't a shred of self-pity in this deeply compassionate book' Marie Claire
'Has immense power and readibility... What it does with aplomb is to track the birth of a nation: the conjuring of modern America from a scorched, dusty wasteland' The Times on Half Broke Horses
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Readers of Walls's bestselling memoir The Glass Castle may find this new novel too familiar to be entirely satisfying. When 12-year-old Bean Holladay and her 15-year-old sister, Liz, are abandoned by their narcissistic, unstable mother, Charlotte, they make their way to Byler, Va., Charlotte's hometown, in search of an uncle they barely know. In Byler, Bean and Liz find not only their uncle, Tinsley, but also a community eager to see how Charlotte's girls have turned out. The sisters attract particular attention from Jerry Maddox, foreman at the town mill, which the Holladays owned and operated in better times. Walls understands in her bones how growing up with a mentally ill parent can give children extraordinary skills and resilience but also leave them without any sense of the boundary between ordinary behavior and abuse. It's clear from the beginning that Bean and Liz's relationship with Maddox won't end well, and their newfound family may not be able to sustain the damage. When Bean reads To Kill a Mockingbird in school, she seems like a long-lost cousin to Scout, and to the young Walls herself. The other characters are too often thinly conceived, but she makes for a strong and spunky protagonist.
