Singing With the Top Down
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- 6,99 €
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- 6,99 €
Publisher Description
At a time in the 1950s when America is a little more innocent, two children and their flamboyant aunt head toward California in a Buick Skylark convertible.
Pauly Mahoney knows if she doesn’t fret about her family, no one will. Certainly not her unstable mother or fun-loving father, who can’t seem to make ends meet without her help. It’s Pauly’s job to hold the family together—until a hot summer night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when her parents are killed in a freak carnival accident and Pauly’s world turns upside down.
Abandoned by indifferent relatives, Pauly and her brother are headed nowhere…until their unfamiliar Aunt Nora volunteers to take them in. No one seems to care that their unlikely guardian angel is a free-spirited, chain-smoking movie extra with no visible means of support. But when Aunt Nora points her stylish car toward California, Pauly and her brother find themselves on a rollicking cross country journey with a woman who will show them that promises can be kept through laughter and tears—and whose open heart has room for both of them and more.
“The most appealing heroine since Scout Finch… I'm telling everyone I know: don't miss this one!”—Cassandra King, author of The Same Sweet Girls
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Precocious 13-year-old Pauly Mahoney heads an ensemble cast of eccentric characters in this coming-of-age charmer. Pauly and her eight-year-old polio-survivor brother, Buddy, lose their parents after a roller-coaster accident at the Fabulous Fortuno Brothers Traveling Carnival in Tulsa, Okla., one hot July 1955 night. The only family member willing to take the pair in is perky Aunt Nora, a wannabe Hollywood actress who shows up with a fat wad of cash, a "cream-puff 1953 Buick Skylark convertible" and the promise of a new life in California. During the road trip to the Golden State, they pick up nursing-home runaway Tybolt Bisbee and Puppy, his smelly dog. The entourage ebbs and flows with the appearance of a misplaced Indian woman and her small son, the 500-year-old mummified remains of a child, and Joe, an ex-navy fighter pilot on his way to L.A. and a new job flying for TWA. Graceful and witty, Pauly's courageous voice is this bighearted novel's greatest strength.
