Trowbridge Road
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In a stunning novel set in the 1980s, a girl with heavy secrets awakens her sleepy street to the complexities of love and courage. It’s the summer of ’83 on Trowbridge Road, and June Bug Jordan is hungry. Months after her father’s death from complications from AIDS, her mother has stopped cooking and refuses to leave the house, instead locking herself away to scour at the germs she believes are everywhere. June Bug threatens this precarious existence by going out into the neighborhood, gradually befriending an imaginative boy who is living with his Nana Jean after experiencing troubles of his own. But as June Bug’s connection to the world grows stronger, her mother’s grows more distant — even dangerous — pushing June Bug to choose between truth and healing and the only home she has ever known. Trowbridge Road paints an unwavering portrait of a girl and her family touched by mental illness and grief. Set in the Boston suburbs during the first years of the AIDS epidemic, the novel explores how a seemingly perfect neighborhood can contain restless ghosts and unspoken secrets. Written with deep insight and subtle lyricism by acclaimed author Marcella Pixley, Trowbridge Road demonstrates our power to rescue one another even when our hearts are broken.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drawing comparisons to Bridge to Terabithia, this literary middle grade novel by Pixley (Ready to Fall) follows two lonely children awash in secrets and hurts. When Ziggy Karlo moves in with his grandmother, Nana Jean, June Bug Jordan is watching from a perch in the branches of a copper beech tree. She's an isolated child whose father died early in the AIDS crisis, before much was known, and whose mother has been lost to mental illness and terror of germs ever since, even making June wash with bleach. Though June is at first envious of the way Nana Jean lavishes affection on Ziggy, a bullied boy with an impressive vocabulary, she soon befriends her fellow outcast and the two escape to "the ninth dimension... a place you can go only if you are magical." Though both children have been abandoned by parents in different ways, each has a loving adult to turn to at least some of the time, with Nana Jean taking in Ziggy and June's uncle Toby wanting desperately to help his brother's family. Heartbreaking and sometimes emotionally difficult, this novel will appeal to young teens looking for something serious to dig into. Ages 10 up.
