Being Fishkill
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Born in the backseat of a moving car, Carmel Fishkill was unceremoniously pushed into a world that refuses to offer her security, stability, love. At age thirteen-going-on-fifty, she begins to fight back. Carmel Fishkill becomes Fishkill Carmel, who deflects her tormenters with a strong left hook and conceals her secrets from teachers and social workers. But Fishkill’s fierce defenses falter once she meets eccentric optimist Duck-Duck Farina, and soon they, along with Duck-Duck’s mother, Molly, form a tentative family, even as Fishkill struggles to understand her place in it. This fragile new beginning is threatened by the reappearance of Fishkill’s unstable mother — and by unfathomable tragedy. Poet Ruth Lehrer’s young adult debut is a stunning, revelatory look at what defines and sustains “family.” And, just as it does for Fishkill, meeting Duck-Duck Farina and her mother will leave readers forever changed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Lehrer's engrossing first novel, 12-year-old Carmel Fishkill (named after a highway exit sign her mother, Keely, glimpsed while giving birth in the back seat of a car) decides that starting seventh grade in a new school is an opportunity to toughen up her image, now that her abusive grandfather is dead and her drug-addicted mother has vanished. Starting with a name reversal, Carmel becomes dangerous Fishkill, but her plan is thrown off course when precocious but equally tough Duck-Duck Farina befriends her. Flashbacks to the poverty and neglect Fishkill endured with her grandfather (there are strong hints that he is actually Fishkill's father) and mother sharply contrast with Duck-Duck's affectionate relationship with her nurturing gay mother and their well-kept home, into which Fishkill is welcomed. The sexual identities of Duck-Duck's mother and Fishkill, who grows attracted to Duck-Duck, are simply an understated part of the story's backdrop. The plot, as well as Duck-Duck and Fishkill's friendship, twists and turns as Keely reappears and disappears, until a tragic development changes the entire tone of the book, providing a bittersweet resolution. Ages 14 up.
