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Narrated by Carrington MacDuffie
Jerry SpinelliUnabridged — 7 hours, 0 minutes
Narrated by Carrington MacDuffie
Jerry SpinelliUnabridged — 7 hours, 0 minutes
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…how can you profoundly miss a parent you never knew? And if you're looking everywhere for someone to be the mother you never had, will the world present an endless series of heartbreaking disappointments? Set mainly in 1959, in a small Pennsylvania town, this latest novel by Jerry Spinelli…explores these questions and many others with the flair of a master storyteller…[The Warden's Daughter] is never boring and never predictable.
06/05/2017
The latest from Newbery medalist Spinelli is a coming-of-age story set in Two Mills, Pa. The story opens with the protagonist Cammie O’Reilly, an elderly grandmother, remembering the summer of 1959, when she was 12 and lived with her father in a house adjacent to the Hancock County Prison, where he was the prison warden. The summer was emotionally treacherous for young Cammie, who was just coming to terms with her mother’s death. She spent the dog days inside the prison gates passing the time with the women inmates. Actor MacDuffie performs the first-person retrospective narrative in a soothing but straightforward manner, letting Spinelli’s masterful prose take center stage. When the story takes a tragic turn, MacDuffie adds due emotion to her otherwise calm reading, which makes for a powerful ending. Ages 9–12. A Knopf hardcover. (Jan.)
★ 11/14/2016
In this poignant coming-of-age story, Newbery Medalist Spinelli invites readers to revisit Two Mills, Pa. (last seen in Maniac Magee), during the 1950s to meet the 12-year-old daughter of a prison warden. When Cammie was a baby, her mother saved her life and was killed in the process. Still feeling her mother’s absence, Cammie lives a lonely existence with her father above the town prison. During the summer, she fills the hours by visiting the women inmates, playing records with her 12-going-on-17 best friend, and trying to turn her caregiver, Eloda Pupko, into a replacement mother. But Cammie’s failing schemes, coupled with another painful loss, cause her to lash out at everyone in her path. Spinelli again shows his mastery at evoking a particular time and place while delving into the heart of a troubled adolescent, creating an evocative backdrop through the sounds of early rock and roll, the smell of frying scrapple, and the sights of children freely roaming their neighborhoods. Like Cammie’s quietly wise housekeeper, readers will understand Cammie’s frustrations and cheer her on as she confronts her deepest emotions. Ages 9–12. (Jan.)
"This book is never boring and never predictable. Fame, good and bad fortune, friendship and mental illness all make their way into [Cammie's] narrative."—The New York Times Book Review
"Spinelli again shows his mastery at evoking a particular time and place while delving into the heart of a troubled adolescent..."— Publishers Weekly, starred review
"The prison community is a powerful backdrop for Cammie’s turbulent coming of age, populated with messy lives that brighten in Cammie’s presence but that have their own demons to tame." — Bulletin, starred review
"Jerry Spinelli again proves why he's the king of storytellers." — Shelf Awareness, starred review
"This is a story about facing hard truths and growing up. Readers will love the details of having a prison compound for a home and adore the many secondary characters who help keep Cammie’s head above water during her desperate search for happiness." — Booklist
"Spinelli’s gift for humorous chaos and his trademark magic realism touches are showcased here, and it is exhilarating to read about kids with so much urban freedom." — The Horn Book
"Character development and realistic dialogue shine in this emotional historical fiction title. Spinelli’s characters are achingly real."—School Library Journal
05/01/2017
Gr 5–8—In 2017, Cammie O'Reilly is an elderly grandmother visiting her childhood home with her 12-year-old granddaughter after half a century away. While the outside still looks like the same "fortress from the Middle Ages," the inside now houses birds, butterflies, and turtles rather than the 200-plus inmates of the Hancock County Prison—where Cammie; her widowed father, the warden; and their prisoner-cum-housekeeper Eloda once lived. In the summer of 1959, when Cammie was about to turn 13, her search for a mother figure became desperate as she looked to Eloda, a storytelling inmate and another child's mother, for maternal connection. Amid American Bandstand, hidden cigarette packs, and visits to the prison yard, Cammie comes of age, saved by the kindness of strangers. Carrington MacDuffie is a fine narrator as the grandmother; although the more mature-voiced casting seems initially obvious, because the vast majority of the narrative belongs to a 12-year-old, MacDuffie's older characterization ultimately feels miscast as young Cammie's story progresses. VERDICT Libraries will likely be better suited to recommending Spinelli's latest on the printed page. ["Sentimental and reflective, this nostalgic story will strike a deeper chord in adults than in middle graders": SLJ 11/16 review of the Knopf book.]—Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
11/01/2016
Gr 5–8—As an elderly grandmother, Cammie looks back on the summer of 1959, when she lived with her stoic warden father in an apartment adjacent to Pennsylvania's Hancock County Prison. Young Cammie is filled with unprocessed grief from her mother's tragic death. She decides that Eloda Pupko, the distant but constant prison housekeeper, should be her mother figure. The summer is full of change. Cammie's fame-hungry best friend outgrows her, and her close relationship with verbose Boo Boo Dunbar, one of a handful of African American inmates, ends in numb grief when Boo Boo commits suicide. Finally, Eloda helps Cammie truly grieve for her mother in order to move on. Character development and realistic dialogue shine in this emotional historical fiction title. The pent-up anger that bubbles under the surface of Cammie's memories is palpable. Spinelli's characters are achingly real at times, although some readers may find it difficult to care about such a spoiled, entitled protagonist. With narration by an elderly Cammie, Spinelli artfully adds foreshadowing to keep the plot moving. However, the pacing is slowed by adult Cammie's endless reflections on her emotions and behavior. The grandmotherly perspective lacks a tangible connection to young Cammie's confusion on the cusp of teenager-dom. Period-specific details abound, but some hit the mark without context (will young readers understand that the passing reference to "the Hokey Pokey man" is 1950s slang for ice-cream man?). VERDICT Sentimental and reflective, this nostalgic story will strike a deeper chord in adults than in middle graders.—Amy Seto Forrester, Denver Public Library
Narrator Carrington MacDuffie portrays 12-year-old Cammie, a tomboy, with a youthful voice. Her story takes place during the summer of 1959 at the prison where her father works. MacDuffie perfectly captures the grief and anger Cammie feels after her mother’s death. To fill the emptiness, she decides that Eloda, a prisoner who works as her family’s housekeeper, will be her mother figure. But Eloda is to be released soon. MacDuffie portrays Eloda in a stern yet compassionate voice that reflects her nurturing but distant nature. Listeners will be captivated with the story’s historical details, including depictions of the TV show “American Bandstand” and the intricacies of the prison life, as well as the overarching story of Cammie as she comes to understand herself. M.D. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
★ 2016-09-19
Perpetually angry, motherless Cammie O’Reilly, the warden’s daughter, sets about turning Eloda Pupko, the silent, distant trustee working as “Cammie-keeper,” into a mother figure over the summer she turns 13. Set in 1959 in the Two Mills, Pennsylvania, of Spinelli's own childhood, this is firmly grounded in its time and place and full of details of life at Hancock County Prison. Cammie’s essential compassion shows in her willingness to spend time with all the incarcerated women, her particular affection for Boo Boo, a large, ebullient black woman who befriends the sad white child, and her disgust at best friend Reggie's admiration for their most famous inmate, a murderer. Reggie lusts for fame herself; one highlight of the summer is her appearance on the TV show Bandstand—watched and loudly applauded by a gang of rising Two Mills seventh-graders who are the friends who move into Cammie’s life without any apparent effort and who are firmly ejected as Cammie’s spiral into depression’s depths approaches its climax. Cammie tells her own story chronologically, until its whirlwind crest; she frames it with scenes from the present. It’s a tapestry of grief and redemption, woven by a master storyteller who never loses his focus on Cammie’s personal journey but connects it to Eloda’s in a powerful twist. Moving and memorable. (Historical fiction. 9-12)
| BN ID: | 2940169352955 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 01/03/2017 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Age Range: | 8 - 11 Years |
1
Breakfast time in the prison. The smell of fried scrapple filled the apartment. It happened every morning.
“I could teach you how to do it yourself,” she said. “It’s simple.”
“I want you to do it,” I said.
“You’ll be a teenager soon. You’ll have to learn someday.”
“You’re doing it,” I told her. “Case closed.”
Her name was Eloda Pupko. She was a prison trustee. She took care of our apartment above the prison entrance. Washed. Ironed. Dusted. And kept me company. Housekeeper. Cammie-keeper.
At the moment, she was braiding my hair.
“Okay,” she said. “Done.”
I squawked. “Already?” I didn’t want her to be done.
“This little bit?” She gave it a tug.
She was right. I’d wanted a pigtail down the middle, but all my short hair allowed was barely a one-knotter. A pigstub.
I felt her leaving me. I whirled. “No!”
She stopped, turned, eyebrows arching. “No?”
I blurted the first thing that came to mind. “I want a ribbon.”
Her eyes went wide. And then she laughed. And kept laughing.
She knew what I knew: I was anything but a hair-ribbon kind of girl. I sat on the counter stool dressed in dungarees, black-and-white high-top Keds and a striped T-shirt. My baseball glove lay on the other stool.
When she had laughed herself out, she said, “Ribbon? On a cannonball firebug?”
She had a point on both counts.
Cannonball was my nickname. As for “firebug” . . .
In school two months earlier we had been learning about the Unami, the Native Americans from our area. This inspired me to make a fire the old-fashioned Unami way. For reasons knowable only to the brain of a sixth grader, I decided to do so in our bathtub.
On the way home from school one day, I detoured to the railroad tracks and creek and collected my supplies: a quartz stone, a rusty iron track-bed spike and a handful of dry, mossy stuff from the ground under a bunch of pine trees. I laid it all in the bathtub. And climbed in.
Over the mossy nest I smashed and scratched the stone and spike into each other. My arms were ready to fall off when a thin curl of smoke rose out of the nest. I blew on it. A spark appeared. “What are you doing?” said Eloda from the doorway. I glanced up at her--and screamed, because the spark had flamed and burned my thumb. Stone and spike clanked on porcelain. Eloda turned on the shower, putting out the fire and drenching me. When I dried off and changed my clothes, she put Vaseline and a Band-Aid on the burn and told me to tell people I had cut myself slicing tomatoes.
Eloda tapped my hand. “Lemme see.”
I showed her. The burn was just a pale pink trace by now. She took my hand in both of hers. She seemed to hold it longer than necessary.
“Number one law,” she said.
“No more fires,” I said. She had made me recite the words every time she changed the Band-Aid. She still made me say it.
Then her hands were off me, but I was still feeling her. It was her eyes. She was staring at me in a way that seemed to mean something, but I would not find out what till years later.
“Tell you what,” she said, breaking the spell. “If you make it to three knots, I’ll get you a ribbon.”
Again she started to leave.
Again I blurted, “You’re so lucky.”
Again she stopped. “That’s me. Miss Lucky.”
“I mean it,” I said. “You get to have scrapple every day.”
“You’re right,” she said. “That’s why I decided to live here. I love the scrapple.” She walked away.
“Stop!”
She stopped. She waited, her back to me.
“You can’t go,” I told her.
“I have work to do.” She stepped into the dining room.
“I’m your boss!” I called--and instantly wished I could take it back. I added lamely, “When my dad’s not here.”
Her shoulders turned just enough so she could look back at me. Surprisingly, she did not seem angry. She sighed. “Miss O’Reilly--”
I stopped her: “My name is Cammie.”
“Miss Cammie--”
“No!” I snapped. “No Miss. Just Cammie.” She stared. “Say it.” She kept staring. “Please!”
Now she was angry. My name, barely audible, came out with a blown breath: “Cammie.”
She walked away.
This was in mid-June, the fourth day of summer vacation when I was twelve, and I had decided that Eloda Pupko must become my mother.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Warden's Daughter"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Jerry Spinelli.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Children's Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
As both a parent and a teacher, I’ve always believed strongly in the philosophy of, “It takes a village.” Growing up is tough, and the more adult role models our children have, the better. Sometimes those role models are parents. Sometimes they’re teachers, or neighbors. Or sometimes, as in the example of one of the […]
Cammie doesn’t know too much about her biological mother, but what she does know comes from a yellowed newspaper article and the whispered reminiscences of the townfolk. Anne O’Reilly is a bit of a local legend from long ago, known for saving her infant daughter from death, sacrificing her own life in the process. Everybody in […]
