Letters in the Attic
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- €11.99
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- €11.99
Publisher Description
Lizzy McMann, A feisty twelve-year-old, lives with her immature mother and Manny, her father (she thinks) in a fleabag Phoenix hotel. One night, Manny's sudden announcement that he wants a divorce forces mother and daughter to move to upstate New York to live with Lizzy's grandmother and grandfather—a mixed blessing. At school, Lizzy befriends, then falls in love with, Eva Singer, who is dyslexic, looks like Natalie Wood and lives right down the street. Like all girls her age, Lizzy has to deal with her first period, her first bra and her first boyfriend. But what scares her most is her love for Eva. She is also concerned with getting a new husband for Mama—especially after reading Mama's letters that she has found in the attic. Then Eva gets a boyfriend and Mama's life enters what seems to be a new crisis. . . . How Lizzy comes to grips with life's strange twists and turns makes fascinating reading for adults and young readers alike.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A young girl's growing pains include falling for another girl in Bonnie Shimko's Letters in the Attic. In the early 1960s, Lizzy McMann moves from Arizona to upstate New York with her unstable mother after her father runs off with a hatcheck girl. There she meets her grandparents for the first time and strikes up a friendship with Eva, an eighth grader "who looks like Natalie Wood and smokes." Her one-sided attraction to Eva is instant and so are the attendant feelings of shame, confusion and jealousy. Meanwhile, she begins to learn things about her family history that help shed some light on her current circumstances. Lizzie is a charming narrator, a seventh grader hovering between na vet and experience. She notices everything, and while sometimes the details tend to pile up and interfere with the flow of the narrative, there are enough surprises in this appealing story to keep things interesting.
