Alice Cary

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

How High the Moon

Review by Alice Cary

“Don’t you let how nobody treats you in this world make you think that you ain’t worthy,” 12-year-old Henry’s grandfather tells him. It’s one of the many valuable lessons waiting to be discovered in Karyn Parson’s absorbing middle grade debut, How High the Moon, about a trio of African-American cousins trying to find their place in Alcolu, South Carolina, amid the turmoil of 1944 America and the Jim Crow South. Henry, 11-year-old Ella and 14-year-old Myrna all live with their Poppy and Granny. The standout narrator here is biracial Ella, who yearns to know her father’s identity and worries about the colorism she experiences as a result of her light skin tone. Ella soon joins her mother in Boston, where she’s working in the Naval Yard as a shipfitter while trying to make it as a jazz singer. Ella is excited by the prospect of living with her mom, and she’s eager because “Up there, colored folks could go anywhere they wanted.”

Parsons sensitively tackles important issues by weaving in real historical figures and details throughout this story. For example, Myrna has a crush on George Stinney, the 14-year-old African-American boy who was executed in Alcolu after being wrongfully convicted in the murder of two young white girls.

You may recognize Parsons as the actress who portrayed Hilary Banks opposite Will Smith on the 1990s sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” but with How High the Moon, she proves her talent as an author, adroitly packing plenty of plot, characterization and feeling into this story. Begging worthy comparisons to One Crazy Summer and Brown Girl Dreaming, How High the Moon heralds an exciting new voice in historical fiction for young readers.

A trio of African-American cousins try to find their place in Alcolu, South Carolina, amid the turmoil of 1944 America and the Jim Crow South.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

As Long as We Both Shall Live

Review by Alice Cary

Grab a towel—although it’s early in the year, JoAnn Chaney’s As Long as We Both Shall Live is the perfect beach read, a multiple-murder and suspense saga that will keep readers engrossed and guessing.

Two women are killed, one in 1995, the other in 2018, both wives of successful salesman Matt Evans. The second incident is a literal cliffhanger: Matt and his second wife, Marie, are hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park when she falls off a steep cliff into a raging river below.

Detectives Marion Spengler and Ralph Loren doubt the double tragedies are coincidences, although Loren, who appeared in Chaney’s first novel, What You Don’t Know, is bedeviled by his own demons, including a former partner who mysteriously disappeared and whose remains have recently been unearthed. Half-Korean and-half American young mother Spengler is a likable, determined sleuth likely to appear in future novels.

Chaney continues to explore dark themes with her quick but effective character studies and zippy prose. The Colorado-based author is particularly adept at juggling multiple narrators and plot lines, revealing a multitude of tantalizing thoughts and actions while keeping the suspense as high as those Rocky Mountains. Chaney adds to the intrigue a host of song references, calling the novel’s first two sections “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Mama, Just Killed a Man.” Appropriately, the title of the book must be a nod to the Deicide death metal song, “Not as Long as We Both Shall Live.”

As one detective tells naturally suspicious Spengler, “You shouldn’t take anyone at face value.” And neither should readers of As Long as We Both Shall Live. Movie rights have already been snatched up by producer Bruna Papandrea, whose projects include Gone Girl, “Big Little Lies” and The Nightingale.

Grab a towel—although it’s early in the year, JoAnn Chaney’s As Long as We Both Shall Live is the perfect beach read, a multiple-murder and suspense saga that will keep readers engrossed and guessing.

NonfictionMemoir

Maid

Review by Alice Cary

“My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter,” writes Stephanie Land in the opening line of her insightful, moving memoir, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive. Land was planning on attending college and becoming a writer when she became pregnant with her daughter, Mia. After her short relationship with the baby’s father became abusive, Land found herself a single mother with virtually no support network. She depended on food stamps, childcare assistance, part-time work as a housecleaner and occasional charity from friends. When she took her first housecleaning job, she quickly realized, “They don’t pay me enough for this.”

Nonetheless, she persevered, despite the fact that black mold in her studio apartment repeatedly sickened both Mia and herself. “Poverty was like a stagnant pond of mud that pulled at our feet and refused to let go.” Land learns to appreciate what little she has while observing the lives within the homes she cleans, giving them nicknames like the Loving House, the Cat Lady’s House and the Porn House. She realizes that despite her clients’ relative wealth, “they did not seem to enjoy life any more than I did.”

Like Tara Westover in Educated, Land sees education as her salvation. Determined to break free from sickness, poverty and bad luck, she uses a combination of grants, loans and jump-off-the-cliff risk to ultimately pursue her dream of studying creative writing at the University of Montana. 

While books like Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Alissa Quart’s Squeezed present heart-wrenching overviews of poverty in America, Land combines her raw, authentic voice and superb storytelling skills to create a firsthand account from the trenches. Readers will be left wanting to hear more from this talented new voice, and no doubt, she’s got more stories to tell.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

After Stephanie Land’s short relationship with her baby’s father became abusive, Land found herself a single mother with virtually no support network. She depended on food stamps, childcare assistance, part-time work as a housecleaner and occasional charity from friends. When she took her first housecleaning job, she quickly realized, “They don’t pay me enough for this.”

NonfictionMemoir

The Unwinding Miracle

Review by Alice Cary

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, starred review, January 2019

Julie Yip-Williams always sensed that she was living on borrowed time. After she was born blind with cataracts in 1976 in Vietnam, her grandmother ordered her parents to take her to an herbalist to procure poison that would end Yip-Williams’ life. Thankfully, the herbalist refused. Yip-Williams went on to live an extraordinary life until she died of colon cancer at age 42 on March 19, 2018. Her book, The Unwinding of the Miracle: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Everything That Comes After, is equally exceptional.

After immigrating to America as a child, Yip-Williams underwent surgery that restored partial sight. She later graduated from Harvard Law School, traveled the world alone, married, had two daughters and worked at a prestigious New York City law firm, only to be diagnosed with Stage IV cancer in 2013. Her exquisite, honest memoir about living with and dying of cancer is equal parts practical and philosophical.

Yip-Williams writes unflinchingly of learning to move forward with the disease. “Life can and does go on after an appalling diagnosis, even an incurable one,” she writes. She never sugarcoats, however. She purposefully aims “to depict the dark side of cancer and debunk the overly sweet, pink-ribbon facade of positivity and fanciful hope and rah-rah-rah nonsense spewed by cancer patients and others, which I have come to absolutely loathe.” She plans her death carefully, just as she planned her life, teaching her children not to be afraid, that death is part of life. In the last chapter she writes, “I have lived even as I am dying, and therein lies a certain beauty and wonder.”

Full of love, humor, insight and tragedy, her book resonates with wisdom. As her husband so aptly notes, “For the little girl born blind, she saw more clearly than any of us.”

 

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Julie Yip-Williams always sensed that she was living on borrowed time. After she was born blind with cataracts in 1976 in Vietnam, her grandmother ordered her parents to take her to an herbalist to procure poison that would end Yip-Williams’ life. Thankfully, the herbalist refused. Yip-Williams went on to live an extraordinary life until she died of colon cancer at age 42 on March 19, 2018. Her book, The Unwinding of the Miracle: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Everything That Comes After, is equally exceptional.

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Rock What Ya Got

Review by Alice Cary

“Once upon a blank piece of paper, where anything could happen” begins Samantha Berger’s rollicking meditation on self-esteem, Rock What Ya Got. Soon after an artist picks up a pencil and begins to draw, a lively, jubilant girl named Viva with a mop of frizzy hair appears on the page. When the artist―not quite satisfied with her creation―decides to erase and start over, defiant Viva grabs the pencil and announces, “Excuse me, Lady Artist, ma’am, but I like me the way I am.”

Thus begins a spirited back-and-forth between the illustrator and her subject, as the artist tries to adjust various things: first Viva’s hair, then her body and finally the background of the pages. Illustrations by Kerascoët (a pseudonym for a French husband-and-wife art team) energize this artistic spat, showing humorous alternative versions of Viva as a princess, ballerina, weightlifter, gymnast and mermaid. Meanwhile, Viva advocates for her original self, saying, “Be your best you and rock what ya got. Don’t let anyone say what you’re not.”

Observant readers will notice striking similarities between Viva and the artist, who finally realizes that Viva’s message, “Rock What Ya Got,” is something she wrote long ago as a child―and something she must never again forget.

Berger, whose many books include Crankenstein and Martha Doesn’t Say Sorry, delivers a vital message in a lighthearted way. This creative contemplation about both the artistic process and one’s sense of self-worth packs the perfect visceral and visual punch for young readers.

Children will learn to love their features in Samantha Berger's rollicking meditation on self-esteem, Rock What Ya Got.
Children's & YAPicture Book

Carmela Full of Wishes

Review by Alice Cary

Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson earned (respectively) a Newbery Medal and a Caldecott Honor for Last Stop on Market Street, and now they’re at it again with another potential award winner, Carmela Full of Wishes. On the surface, their latest collaboration is a simple story about a spunky Mexican-American girl and her older brother, but like its predecessor, it packs a powerful literary, visual and social punch without ever once being preachy.

It’s Carmela’s birthday, which means she’s finally old enough to accompany her brother to the laundromat, much to his ongoing chagrin. Carmela excitedly tags along down Freedom Boulevard, past the bus stop, a repair shop and a store where her father used to linger, hoping for work. When Carmela picks a dandelion growing in a sidewalk crack, she contemplates a variety of wishes, imagining her mother sleeping in one of the fancy hotel rooms that she cleans, or her father “getting his papers fixed so he could finally be home.”

The story’s finest points are sublimely subtle with layers of meaning, as when Carmela’s brother asks her why she’s so annoying, and she shoots back, “It’s a free country.” Illustrator Robinson marvelously envisions Carmela’s many wishes as papel picado (Mexican folk art), and his vibrant acrylic and collage illustrations pay homage to Ezra Jack Keats.

Carmela Full of Wishes is a big-hearted story about the hope, joy and love that hold struggling families together amid weighty, adult-size obstacles.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson earned (respectively) a Newbery Medal and a Caldecott Honor for Last Stop on Market Street, and now they’re at it again with another potential award winner, Carmela Full of Wishes. On the surface, their latest collaboration is a simple story about a spunky Mexican-American girl and her older brother, but like its predecessor, it packs a powerful literary, visual and social punch without ever once being preachy.

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

The Season of Styx Malone

Review by Alice Cary

BookPage Children's Top Pick, November 2018

Ten-year-old Caleb Franklin longs to be anything but ordinary, which feels impossible in his quiet hometown of Sutton, Indiana. But one night, Caleb and his 11-year-old brother, Bobby Gene, trade their toddler sister, Susie, for a large bag of fireworks.

Never fear—their mom soon retrieves little Susie, but the boys manage to keep the fireworks. Their summer really ignites when the brothers meet an older teen in foster care named Styx Malone, who hatches a plan to help the boys repeatedly “trade up” their loot—with the goal of eventually buying a moped—in what he calls a “Great Escalator Trade.”

Award-winning author Kekla Magoon’s The Season of Styx Malone is an old-fashioned summer adventure and coming-of-age story that ever so gently touches on the racial prejudice faced by its three African-American protagonists.

Caleb and his brother live in a parent-protected bubble that they’re more than ready to burst, and their mom dismisses Styx as “a handful of trouble.” But to Caleb, this smooth-talking, deal-making newcomer represents everything he feels he’s missing in his small town.

But as the three boys’ adventures multiply, they also become more dangerous and questionable. The boys are soon stowing away on trains and stealing a motor from an auto parts warehouse. Still mesmerized by Styx, Caleb begins to wonder about his friend’s motives and deeds, noticing that “Styx made it sound like breaking the rules wasn’t really so bad as long as you didn’t get caught.”

As the boys’ secretive exploits build toward an inevitable climax, readers will enjoy being part of Magoon’s thoughtful novel about the pleasures and constraints of friendship, family, trust and betrayal.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Ten-year-old Caleb Franklin longs to be anything but ordinary, which feels impossible in his quiet hometown of Sutton, Indiana. But one night, Caleb and his 11-year-old brother, Bobby Gene, trade their toddler sister, Susie, for a large bag of fireworks.

NonfictionMemoir

Late-Life Love

Review by Alice Cary

What do literature and film tell us about living and loving in later life? What is it like to experience life in its latter stages? These are the questions Susan Gubar began to answer during a year in which she and her second husband decided they must leave their beloved home of many years and downsize to an apartment.

Late-Life Love is a unique blend of memoir and literary commentary, with Gubar at the helm as an accomplished, bravely honest and mesmerizing guide. A retired professor at the University of Indiana, she is the co-author of the groundbreaking The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. She’s also shared her own cancer struggle in Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer.

The love of Gubar’s life is retired English professor Donald Gray, with whom she shares a “head-over-heals” romance with literature. She deems her “heals” typo apt, as they have both faced a variety of serious physical challenges: Don, 17 years her senior, fell and required knee surgery as she wrote this book, while she remains weakened by cancer. She’s jubilant to have survived well beyond her projected “expiration date” given at the time of diagnosis, thanks to an experimental drug.

Theirs is a cerebral household catering to a cavalcade of friends, children and grandchildren; readers will delight in being welcomed into the fold. Amid joys and concerns (a sick grandchild, an estranged friend), the author shares the many fears and second thoughts she and her husband have while trying to navigate their monumental transition.

Throughout, Gubar seamlessly weaves in lengthy discussions of a wide range of literature addressing late-life concerns, including works by Shakespeare, John Donne, Donald Hall, Colette, Gabriel García Márquez and Marilynne Robinson. Reading these analyses is like having a season ticket to a series of fascinating literary discussions. Gubar offers both realism and hope, concluding: “Late-life love may heat at a lower temperature, but it bubbles and rises.”

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What do literature and film tell us about living and loving in later life? What is it like to experience life in its latter stages? These are the questions Susan Gubar began to answer during a year in which she and her second husband decided they must leave their beloved home of many years and downsize to an apartment.

NonfictionMemoir

Changing lives, one girl at a time

Review by Alice Cary

Khalida Brohi, named one of Forbes “30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs in Asia,” has an engrossing, important story to tell about her childhood in Pakistan. Her mother was 9 years old when she married Brohi’s father, who was 13, in an “exchange marriage.” Brohi, the oldest daughter of her parents’ eight children, was born in a tribal area of the country when her mother was 14. Born severely malnourished, she wasn’t expected to survive. Yet survive she did, and despite living in poverty and moving between rural areas, slums, towns and cities over the years, she describes her childhood as “joyous” in I Should Have Honor: A Memoir of Hope and Pride in Pakistan. 

That happiness was forever tarnished, however, in 1999. That year, Brohi’s uncle and two others strangled her 14-year old cousin, Khadija, in an “honor killing,” because Khadija ran away with her boyfriend, leaving behind the man she had been promised to as a young girl.

“The pain shoved me into a new reality,” Brohi writes. Luckily, her own parents had very different ideas than the rest of their family, and they refused to promise Brohi to anyone, in defiance of tribal custom. Her father explained that instead, his daughter’s job was to honor her family with good grades and an education. Brohi did just that, becoming a vocal advocate against honor killings, working to empower Pakistani women and to redefine the tribal definition of honor. That journey began when she was just 16 and has taken her around the world, despite death threats and even an office bombing.

She founded a nonprofit called Sughar Foundation (sughar means “skilled and confident woman” in Urdu), which focuses on the empowerment of women in rural Pakistan. Its goal is to put an end to exchange marriages, child marriages and honor killings while offering job training to women in traditional embroidery. The organization teaches women about their equal status and rights, and helps them launch their own businesses.

Writing in compelling, page-turning prose, Brohi shares a deeply felt, intimate portrait of what it means to be a global activist. There’s even a love story―one with a happy ending. Don’t miss I Should Have Honor, which deserves a legion of caring, activist readers.

Khalida Brohi, named one of Forbes “30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs in Asia,” has an engrossing, important story to tell about her childhood in Pakistan. Her mother was 9 years old when she married Brohi’s father, who was 13, in an “exchange marriage.” Brohi, the oldest daughter of her parents’ eight children, was born in a tribal area of the country when her mother was 14. Born severely malnourished, she wasn’t expected to survive. Yet survive she did, and despite living in poverty and moving between rural areas, slums, towns and cities over the years, she describes her childhood as “joyous” in I Should Have Honor: A Memoir of Hope and Pride in Pakistan. 

Children's & YAPicture Book

Our favorite bear returns

Review by Alice Cary

Great news for Corduroy fans: In honor of the 50th anniversary of Don Freeman’s classic 1968 picture book, the adventurous bear stars in a new adventure, Corduroy Takes a Bow, written by legendary stage and screen actress Viola Davis.

In this new story, Corduroy heads to a Broadway show (“Mother Goose Live”) with his owner, Lisa, and her mother, and his quest to get a better view leads to an exciting on-stage conclusion. The book is a fitting tribute to Corduroy’s creator, as Freeman was a Broadway aficionado, often hanging out backstage and sketching actors.

Davis was eager to take on the project because Freeman’s book meant so much to her as a child: She remembers Corduroy as one of the few books that featured an African-American heroine. “To be able to introduce a new generation, including my daughter, to this character that was so special to me in my childhood is an incredible honor,” Davis said in a recent interview with People.

Corduroy Takes a Bow stays very much in the spirit of the original book’s prose and illustrations. Jodi Wheeler works in Freeman’s distinctive art style, filling Davis’ story with pastel-toned, old-fashioned yet lively illustrations.

This new Corduroy adventure will encourage a whole new generation of young readers to fall in love with this very special bear.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Great news for Corduroy fans: In honor of the 50th anniversary of Don Freeman’s classic 1968 picture book, the adventurous bear stars in a new adventure, Corduroy Takes a Bow, written by legendary stage and screen actress Viola Davis.

YA FictionYA

College Rejection 101

Review by Alice Cary

Ariel Kaplan’s We Regret to Inform You is a compelling novel about every highly motivated college applicant’s worst nightmare. High school senior Mischa Abramavicius should have had it made. She goes to a tony prep school on scholarship where she’s a star student. But when college acceptances start rolling in and her classmates are accepted to places like Harvard and Princeton, Mischa gets nothing but rejections. She doesn’t even get into her safety school, Paul Revere University.

Shocked and ashamed to tell her single mother, Mischa visits Revere’s admissions office and discovers that her transcript has been altered. But her original transcript is in order, leading Mischa to realize that something fishy is going on. With help from her best friend, Nate, and a group of hacker girls who call themselves the Ophelia Syndicate, Mischa begins to dig deeper.

As unlikely as this all sounds, Kaplan makes everything seem believable with the help of her wisecracking yet thoughtful narrator. Without any college acceptances, Mischa begins to question her very identity. But as she gets to the bottom of her application disaster, she also re-examines her dreams, goals and all-consuming pursuit of success.

We Regret to Inform You is an entertaining look at the college admissions rat race that includes crime, a cover-up and plenty of heart and soul.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Ariel Kaplan’s We Regret to Inform You is a compelling novel about every highly motivated college applicant’s worst nightmare. High school senior Mischa Abramavicius should have had it made. She goes to a tony prep school on scholarship where she’s a star student. But when college acceptances start rolling in and her classmates are accepted to places like Harvard and Princeton, Mischa gets nothing but rejections. She doesn’t even get into her safety school, Paul Revere University.

NonfictionSocial Science

The damage done

Review by Alice Cary

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, August 2018

Dopesick is no doubt the hardest book that award-winning journalist Beth Macy (Truevine, Factory Man) has written, and it left this reviewer in tears. Macy spent six years following families affected by the opioid epidemic in and around her adopted hometown of Roanoke, Virginia, and she begins by noting that several interviewees died before she had time to transribe her interview notes. It’s a heart-wrenching and thorough treatise on the national crisis that everyone knows about, but few deeply understand.

Macy addresses a wealth of complex issues in her engaging, spitfire prose, such as the difficulties of rehab and disagreements about the benefits of 12-step programs versus medication-assisted treatment. Macy is a masterful storyteller, and Dopesick is full of unforgettable stories, including those of policemen, caregivers, prosecutors and a dope dealer named Ronnie Jones.

Macy traces the origins of the crisis, which was perpetuated by Purdue Pharma, a company owned by one of the richest families in America. Purdue went from “selling earwax remover and laxatives to the most lucrative drug in the world”—prescription opioids they claimed were not addictive. As one Virginia lawyer aptly notes, “the victims were getting jail time instead of the people who caused it.”

Dopesick is dedicated to the memory of 10 opioid victims. Their stories and those of their surviving families form the heart of this book. There’s Jesse Bolstridge, a 19-year-old high school football star, and “blond and breezy” 21-year-old Scott Roth, who “looked like one of the Backstreet Boys.” Macy herself wasn’t immune to the heartache, admitting that there “were times that journalistic boundaries blurred,” especially when it came to the lively and likable young mother Tess Henry, whom Macy interviewed during drives to Henry’s Narcotics Anonymous meetings for several months.

There are no easy fixes, of course. Macy writes, “America’s approach to its opioid problem is to rely on Battle of Dunkirk strategies—leaving the fight to well-meaning citizens, in their fishing vessels and private boats—when what’s really needed to win the war is a full-on Normandy Invasion.” It’s indeed time to storm the beaches, and Dopesick is a moving, must-read analysis of a national crisis.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage and edited online for clarity. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Dopesick is no doubt the hardest book that award-winning journalist Beth Macy (Truevine, Factory Man) has written, and it left this reviewer in tears. Macy spent six years following families affected by the opioid epidemic in and around her adopted hometown of Roanoke, Virginia, and she begins by noting that several interviewees died before this book was published. It’s a heart-wrenching and thorough treatise on the national crisis that everyone knows about, but few deeply understand.

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

A family finds strength in relying on one another

Review by Alice Cary

In Cindy Baldwin’s big-hearted debut novel, Where the Watermelons Grow, everything seems to be going wrong for 12-year-old Della Kelly. There’s currently a summer drought in her town of Maryville, North Carolina, which is bad news for the Kelly family farm―even their beloved watermelons are dying on the vine. But what worries Della the most is the fact that her mother’s schizophrenia is flaring up for the first time in four years, leaving her unable to function, much less care for Della’s 16-month-old sister, Mylie.

Della can’t help feeling that her mother’s illness is her fault, since her symptoms appeared soon after Della was born. Feeling that it’s up to her to not only to help, but cure, her mother, she seeks out Tabitha Quigley, a local beekeeper whose family’s honey seems to hold magical cures. But Miss Tabitha doesn’t offer the cure that Della yearns for, leaving her feeling more isolated and helpless than ever.

Baldwin’s portrait of a strong, loving family facing a mental health crisis is nuanced, sensitive and believable. Although Della can’t bear to confide her worries in her best friend, both she and her father slowly realize they can’t keep their problems to themselves.

One of the great strengths of this book is that Baldwin offers plenty of hope but no easy fixes. Della learns invaluable lessons and realizes she has strengths she never imagined along with supportive family and friends who are ready to help. And most of all she learns that “No sickness in the world could make my mama’s love for us less real.”

Where the Watermelons Grow is a spot-on, insightful novel about a preteen learning to live with and accept a parent’s mental illness.

In Cindy Baldwin’s big-hearted debut novel, Where the Watermelons Grow, everything seems to be going wrong for 12-year-old Della Kelly. There’s currently a summer drought in her town of Maryville, North Carolina, which is bad news for the Kelly family farm―even their beloved watermelons are dying on the vine. But what worries Della the most is the fact that her mother’s schizophrenia is flaring up for the first time in four years, leaving her unable to function, much less care for Della’s 16-month-old sister, Mylie.

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