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Summary
Summary
With Dickensian exuberance in language and gesture, (Hamilton) evokes the physicalness of family intimacy . . . with astonishing moments of betrayal and redemption that sweep you right out of yourself.--Booklist.
Author Notes
Virginia Hamilton was born March 12, 1934. She received a scholarship to Antioch College, and then transferred to the Ohio State University in Columbus, where she majored in literature and creative writing. She also studied fiction writing at the New School for Social Research in New York.
Her first children's book, Zeely, was published in 1967 and won the Nancy Bloch Award. During her lifetime, she wrote over 40 books including The People Could Fly, The Planet of Junior Brown, Bluish, Cousins, the Dies Drear Chronicles, Time Pieces, Bruh Rabbit and the Tar Baby Girl, and Wee Winnie Witch's Skinny. She was the first African American woman to win the Newbery Award, for M. C. Higgins, the Great. She has won numerous awards including three Newbery Honors, three Coretta Scott King Awards, an Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, and the Hans Christian Andersen Award. She was also the first children's author to receive a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant in 1995.
She died from breast cancer on February 19, 2002 at the age of 67.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A tragedy forces Cammy to confront ambivalent feelings about two very different cousins; PW noted that this ``elegant, stirring tapestry of family life . . . features strong characterizations and incisive writing.'' Ages 9-13. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
Eleven-year-old Cammy is devastated and haunted by guilt, memory, and her own imaginings when her detested cousin, the practically perfect, pampered Patty Ann, drowns. Cammy is eventually healed by the calm attentiveness of her father and the restorative understanding of her beloved grandmother. The book deals powerfully with emotions and sensations, and the writing reverberates with honesty and truth. From HORN BOOK 1990, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
Gr. 5-8. Something about her Gram brings out the best in 11-year-old Cammy, but her cousin Patty Ann brings out the worst. Beautiful and smart, goody-goody Patty Ann is queen of the summer day camp in their small Ohio town, and she can sit on her hair. When Patty Ann calls Gram "that smelly old bag of bones that's dying," Cammy's hatred bursts out; she taunts Patty Ann with her ugly secret (the kids have discovered that she's bulimic, "junk-and-sick" below the lovely face). Cammy's own ugly secret is that she's ashamed of her third cousin, Elodie, poor and "nearly homeless," who clings to Cammy and wants to be her friend. Yet despite her gnawing jealousy and her fear that her beloved Gram is dying, Cammy's a happy kid--"most of the time everything looked pretty good to her"--at home with her divorced mother and older brother and at day camp with its comfortable routine. There's such confident love and candor in the way Hamilton writes about friends, family, and community. With Dickensian exuberance in language and gesture, she evokes the physicalness of family intimacy, the way people lean on each other, snuggle, share food, drink in feelings. But happy doesn't mean nice all the time. Who hasn't wished a close rival, a relative, dead? And even the town can turn vicious against its own. There are some minor flaws--Patty Ann's mother is one-dimensional, too clearly the "cause" of her child's illness--but this is Hamilton's best since Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush [BKL Ag 82]. She connects the mean and the transcendent in those who are kin and in all of us. Above all, it's story that makes this book special, with astonishing moments of betrayal and redemption that sweep you right out of yourself. It would be unfair to tell what happens. Read it. ~--Hazel Rochman
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-8-- Cammy feels things strongly, whether it's the immeasurable love she has for her Gram Tut, or the jealousy and anger she feels for her perfect, sometimes patronizing cousin Patty Ann. But while those intense emotions make her a strong-willed, feisty girl, they also cause her a great deal of pain when Patty Ann drowns saving another cousin. Only through the wisdom and love of Gram and the return of her estranged father is Cammy able to work her way through the guilt and grief and learn how to accept the reality that someday, too, her beloved Gram will die. Hamilton allows readers to experience the wide-ranging and sometimes lightning-quick changes of emotion of an adolescent girl through a partially stream-of-consciousness style and, at times, abrupt, staccato thoughts. The third-person narrative focuses on Cammy, and through her eyes readers see the effects of her relationships with various family members. While the drowning scene takes on a surrealistic, slow-motion quality that may haunt readers as much as it does Cammy, this is not a story that depends on action to advance the plot. A scene that involves Patty Ann's brother, while revealing some information about her home life and Cammy's feeling for her own brother, does not seem as essential to the story, and there are times when some of Cammy's observations are extraneous. Still, it is Cammy's introspection, doubts, and sensitivity, as well as Hamilton's skill in vividly describing both the physical and the intangible aspects of life, that form the core of this thoughtful story. --Susan Schuller, Milwaukee Public Library (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Cammy is first seen paying one of her regular visits to a nursing home to see her grandmother, Gram Tut, undeterred by rules that say children must be accompanied by adults. But though Cammy is sensitive and loving with Gram Tut, she's no saint: she despises her cousin Patty Ann, who lives in a fancy house, is pampered by an obnoxious mother, and seems to be best at everything she does. On a day-camp trip, while Cammy is in the complex throes of jealousy involving not only Patty Ann but Elodie, a more distant cousin whose mother is a migrant worker, Patty Ann drowns while saving Elodie from a flooding stream. Cammy is torn by guilt and the mistaken conviction that Patty Ann's courageous death was a last taunt of superiority--exacerbated by Cammy's mother's bizarre expressions of grief. In a warm, typical Hamilton conclusion, Cammy's whole family rallies to comfort and bring her back to herself; even Gram Tut makes an extraordinary visit to their home. Unusual, skillfully drawn characters and relationships involve readers in the early part of this story, which picks up its pace as the girls' bickering and jockeying for precedence is suddenly transformed into the suspenseful, ironic tragedy and its aftermath. Another wise, beautifully written book from this well-established master. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
