The Queen of October

by Shelley Fraser Mickle

Overview

A New York Times Notable Book. When Sally Maulden is sent to her grandparents in Coldwater, Arkansas, she believes that she's too boring to be loved. But in this small town she finds love from unexpected sources. "Bursting with warmth. I didn't want it to end."—Chicago Tribune.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781565120037
Publisher:	Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publication date:	01/05/1992
Series:	Front Porch Paperback Ser.
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 6.98(h) x 0.77(d)
Lexile:	830L (what's this?)

About the Author

The Queen of October, named by the New York Times as a Notable Book of 1989, is Shelley Fraser Mickle's first novel. She has since published Replacing Dad with Algonquin Books.

Editorial Reviews

This perceptive and promising coming-of-age tale fondly evokes small-town life in the '60s; its focus is on 13-year-old Sally, who falls in love with an older, alcoholic man and befriends a striptease artist. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

It is 1959 and 13-year-old Sally Maulden is sent to Coldwater, Arkansas, to live with her grandparents while her parents decide whether to divorce. Grandfather Maulden is the town doctor whose ``lab'' turns out bottles of his popular Inside Medicine, while Grandmother wages war with the local newspaper editor over removal of an unsightly outhouse visible to her Missionary Society ladies luncheon. Sally strikes up a friendship with the town dance teacher and develops her first major crush. That the novel is filled with such characters, all with their own eccentricities, may spread the story a bit thin, but Mickle handles the challenge well. Her descriptions of people and places are wonderfully on target: ``The afternoon was mild, a warm late December day with leaves on the ground and grass the color of tea.'' Sally is an engaging narrator whose story is told with humor and compassion. Recommended.-- Mary K. Prokop, CEL Regional Lib., Savannah, Ga.

Library Journal

YA-- Sally Maulden is 13, and her parents are divorcing. She confronts her hurt and fury at parents who are so seemingly selfish as to dump her with her grandparents in Coldwater, Arkansas while they sort things out; she tries to take blame and contrive situations that will put the puzzle back together. She occupies her time observing her grandfather and his home-brewed medicines that are in high demand but under legal censure. Her grandmother is busy : feuding with the newspaper editor over the last outhouse in town, on his property outside her living room window. Sally befriends a rich neighbor and falls in love with him, seeing in him an answer to all her problems. This is a realistic story of a believable heroine who grows up, thanks to love and time, in a small town in the 1960s. The tale is well written, and offers today's readers the chance to look at divorce in process and adolescent concerns from a quieter perspective than their everyday lives. --Dorcas Hand, Episcopal High School, Bellaire, TX

School Library Journal