The conversations she has with her sister, as well as her insights about their relationship, likewise ring true. Breathless and engaging, Fella’s distinctive voice is convincingly childlike. Fella’s present-tense narration paints pictures not just of the difficulties they face on the trip (a snowstorm, car trouble, and an unlikely thief among them), but also of their lives before Mama Lacy’s illness and of the ways that things have changed since then. The year is 2004, before the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, and the girls have been separated by hostile, antediluvian custodial laws. The two white girls squabble and share memories as they travel from West Virginia to Asheville, North Carolina, where Zany is determined to scatter Mama Lacy’s ashes in accordance with her wishes. Twelve-year-old Ophelia, nicknamed Fella, and her 16-year-old sister, Zoey Grace, aka Zany, are the daughters of a lesbian couple, Shannon and Lacy, who could not legally marry. Two sisters make an unauthorized expedition to their former hometown and in the process bring together the two parts of their divided family.ĭooley packs plenty of emotion into this eventful road trip, which takes place over the course of less than 24 hours. By the end of this poignant debut, readers will be applauding Carley’s strength even if they’re as unhappy as Carley is about the resolution.Ī worthy addition to the foster-family shelf. There’s plenty of snappy dialogue as well. The first-person narration allows readers inside Carley’s head as she fights against both showing emotion and her growing pleasure in belonging to their world. Murphy’s patience and surprising understanding, Carley also finds a friend at school in the prickly, Wicked-obsessed Toni.

Slowly won over at home by the boys’ open affection and Mrs. It is 4-year-old Michael Eric and his red-headed brother Adam who first break the ice.

Murphy, a fire chief, and his eldest son Daniel don’t even want her there, and Mrs. She’s torn between her love for her mother and her memory of the fight that sent her to the hospital, when her mother caught and held her for her stepfather. Sent to a foster home after a beating from her stepfather, eighth-grader Carley Connors learns about a different kind of family life, first resisting and then resisting having to leave the loving, loyal Murphys.Ĭarley is a modern-day Gilly Hopkins, bright and strong, angry and deeply hurt.

One of the murphys book