Alice Pelland

by Alice Pelland

Ashley Rhodes-Courter was three years old when police came to arrest her birth mother and place Ashley and her brother Luke in foster care. Nearly nine years later, shortly before her 12th birthday, Ashley finally moved in with Gail and Phil Courter, who would become her adoptive parents. At age 21, a recent college graduate, she decided to tell her story in a memoir to ensure that the voices of children in foster care would be heard. The result, Three Little Words, is a remarkable tribute to the strength of the human spirit.

Ashley's mother, who was abandoned by her own teenage mother, was 17 when she gave birth to Ashley. During Ashley's nine years in foster care, which included 14 placements, she moved from home to home, sometimes taking all her clothing and possessions stuffed in garbage bags and sometimes having to leave everything behind. The only things that were consistent in her life for all of those years were wondering when she would move again and feeling that she was special to no one. Most of her foster homes were overcrowded; in one she was exposed to pornography; and in another she was cruelly abused, beaten, forced to spend the days outside in the hot Florida sun and squat under a counter for hours. The turning point for Ashley was at age nine when Mary Miller was assigned as her volunteer court-appointed advocate. Mary rescued Ashley from being lost in the foster care system and promised to find her a forever family, but moving in with Gail and Phil was not simply a happy ending to her story. Ashley still feared that the Courters would send her back, leading her to test them in many ways. The couple saw things differently and only time and their unfailing commitment finally led Ashley to realize that she was home, surrounded by the love that had so long been missing from her life.

Teens can glean many lessons from Ashley's story the risk of adolescent pregnancies, the value of family connections, the importance of telling the truth and those who work as advocates for children and seek to understand their voices will find this memoir captivating.

Alice Pelland, an adoptive mother, guardian ad litem and foster parent, writes from Hillsborough, North Carolina.

YA, YA Fiction

YA Fiction YA

Finding her place on the family tree

Review by Alice Pelland

by Alice Pelland

In her first novel, Dana Reinhardt has created an exquisite story about teenage choices, goodness, grace and unexpected blessings. Over the course of her junior year in high school, narrator Simone and her friends deal with such issues as teen sexuality, drinking and the need to balance school, family life and activities that will look good on their college applications. (Joining the Atheist Student Association is not exactly what her high school counselor had in mind!) Simone is a bright, loving teen who has a strong relationship with her younger brother and her parents, Elsie and Vince. Though she has always been aware that she was adopted as an infant, she suddenly faces the difficult choice of whether to contact her birth mother. Providing her with a telephone number to a home in Cape Cod and leaving the choice of contact up to her, Simone’s parents encourage her and never feel threatened by this possible reconnection with her past. We learn that Simone’s birth mother, Rivka, was the daughter of a Hasidic Jewish rabbi. She gave birth to Simone at age 16, the same age Simone is now. While seeking the right of Rivka’s father’s congregation to meet in his suburban home, Rivka’s family meets Elsie, a young ACLU lawyer (and atheist) who will become Simone’s adoptive mother. Now living alone in Cape Cod, Rivka earns her living as a photographer. An illness prompts her to contact Simone’s parents, asking to meet Simone. Rivka, who no longer lives as a Hasidic Jew but still practices many traditions of her faith, establishes a fulfilling relationship with Simone that serves to bolster Simone’s love for her adoptive family while satisfying her long-suppressed curiosity about her family tree. Reinhardt demonstrates an unerring ability to capture the voice of an idealistic teen sorting through questions about family, religion and her place in the world. Turning the last page left me immensely proud of Simone, longing to congratulate Elsie and Vince for a job well done, and wishing I could thank Rivka for her compassion and sensitivity. Alice Pelland is an adoptive mother who lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

Fiction

Fiction

Young at heart

Review by Alice Pelland

by Alice Pelland

Max Tivoli, the character at the center of Andrew Sean Greer's remarkable new novel, starts life with a bang. Max is conceived in Golden Gate Park in 1870 at the moment when Blossom Rock is dynamited in San Francisco Bay, creating the largest explosion in the city's history. This, his mother thinks, is what jolts Max's cells into backward growth, the reason that he ages in reverse.

As Max himself explains in The Confessions of Max Tivoli, his real age and the age he appears to be always total 70 years. As an infant, he has the wrinkles and white hair of a man in his late 60s and, in his old age, he looks like his 11-year-old son, Sammy. Resembling a 70-year-old in the year of his birth, Max knows exactly the year he will die: 1941. He forever wears this number, the mark of his fate, on a gold chain.

Love is a difficult and heartbreaking experience for Max. At 17, he is attracted to 14-year-old Alice, but, since he appears to be 53, it is Alice's widowed mother who throws herself at him. Pursuing the beautiful Alice becomes an obsession for Max throughout his life.

In his early years, Max's parents implore him, "Be what they think you are." Max lives by this rule with only two exceptions, telling his secret to his lifelong friend Hughie and to Alice, the love of his life.

A gifted storyteller who has written one previous novel (The Path of Minor Planets), Greer divides his tale into three parts: Max's childhood as an old man, the middle years when he is close to the age he appears to be, and his later years in the body of a young boy. The account of Max's growing young while Hughie and Alice grow old is particularly intriguing, and Greer skillfully explores the different reactions of these two complex confidantes.

With its evocative turn-of-the-century San Francisco setting, The Confessions of Max Tivoli is a strikingly original and beautifully told story that offers a fresh perspective on questions of love and age.

Alice Pelland writes from Hillsborough, North Carolina.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

SHARON WYSE

Review by Alice Pelland

by Alice Pelland

In her first novel, Sharon Wyse skillfully creates the diary of Lou Ann Campbell, an 11-year-old growing up on a wheat farm in northern Texas during the summer of 1960. Beginning when the yellow-green wheat is almost ripe and continuing through the harvest and preparation for the next season's planting, Lou Ann writes poignantly about her coming-of-age summer, during which she makes the painful transition from dolls and imaginary play to adolescent concerns such as sexuality and the status of her family in the outside world.

Isolated on a farm a few miles from the Oklahoma border, Lou Ann's only outside contacts are a friend at church, visitors on the Fourth of July and the wheaties who come each year to harvest the wheat. Her friends and confidantes are five tiny dolls she keeps hidden in a box, each representing one of her mother's five stillborn children. Lou Ann has to write in secret and hide her diary carefully each day so her mother won't find it. Clearly, isolation, grief and the unrelenting hard work of the farm have affected Loretta Campbell's abilities as a wife and mother. In a metaphor that describes her family, Lou Ann explains that when termites attack a house, the outside wood can look fine while the inside is being destroyed.

Despite her isolation and her dysfunctional family, Lou Ann possesses a remarkable spark of wisdom and inner strength. She marvels at the smell that comes before a rain and knows that she wants to remember it forever. She savors the nights when there are so many stars in the sky she could never count them all.

Eventually, the young girl comes to the crucial realization that the past is all we have to prepare ourselves for the future. Most importantly, in this memorable summer, Lou Ann learns what she needs to survive.

Alice Pelland came of age in Texas in the 1960s and writes from Hillsborough, North Carolina.

In her first novel, Sharon Wyse skillfully creates the diary of Lou Ann Campbell, an 11-year-old growing up on a wheat farm in northern Texas during the summer of 1960.