Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir - Couverture rigide

Smith, Mary-Ann Tirone

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0749081287 ISBN 13 : 9780749081287

Editeur : Allison & Busby, 2007

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

"A masterful fiction writer tells her own story: one little girl dies, the other comes of age and gives voice to herself and her murdered friend. Riveting, heartbreaking, hilarious, I loved this book for its compassion, its vividness, and its flashes of justifiable anger. A life-affirming read."

-- Wally Lamb, author of She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True

"This is a riveting book, memory lane as a crime scene that needs to be relived to be understood. In this family saga of ethnic New England (a seldom-visited subject, but one dear to my heart), Ms. Tirone Smith has put all her energy as a writer of crime fiction to solve a mystery from her own past."

-- Paul Theroux

"Girls of Tender Age begins as a charming story of place; it becomes a brutal moral indictment and a very important book. Mary-Ann Tirone Smith writes with the muscle and sly ease which are the hallmarks of a master at work."

-- Haven Kimmel, author of A Girl Named Zippy and She Got Up Off the Couch

"I read Tirone Smith's memoir with my heart in my mouth. What starts as an evocation of a lost time -- immigrant lives in 1950s Hartford -- takes a dark turn when a killer walks into this world. Visceral, sharp-edged, beautifully nuanced, Girls of Tender Age is the real deal."

-- Alison Smith, author of Name All the Animals

"Mary-Ann Tirone Smith is an adept literary juggler. She creates a tour de force in Girls of Tender Age by combining a coming-of-age story with a heinous crime that shapes her life. In addition, we get a visceral sense of the Connecticut she grew up in and a fascinating look at her family's struggle with an autistic sibling. I could not put this book down until I had turned every page."

-- Jane Stern, author of Ambulance Girl

"Nostalgia collides with horror in Girls of Tender Age, and the effect is once warm and unsettling. Mary-Ann Tirone Smith's voice is wry and elegiac, and her memoir is utterly absorbing."

-- Stewart O'Nan, author of Wish You Were Here

"When you read Girls of Tender Age, you will realize that this could be the best family memoir you have ever read. Smith is more than a masterful writer. We are carried along on a wondrous peregrination among bookies, catatonics, crazy relatives hiding in the coal bin or plopped under a wedding table -- a veritable whirl of family dysfunction presented by an artful and very functional storyteller. I loved reading this book."

-- Dennis Smith, author of Report from Ground Zero and San Francisco Is Burning

Présentation de l'éditeur :

In Girls of Tender Age, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith fully articulates with great humor and tenderness the wild jubilance of an extended French-Italian family struggling to survive in a post-World War II housing project in Hartford, Connecticut. Smith seamlessly combines a memoir whose intimacy matches that of Angela's Ashes with the tale of a community plagued by a malevolent predator that holds the emotional and cultural resonance of The Lovely Bones.

Smith's Hartford neighborhood is small-town America, where everyone's door is unlocked and the school, church, library, drugstore, 5 & 10, grocery, and tavern are all within walking distance. Her family is peopled with memorable characters -- her possibly psychic mother who's always on the verge of a nervous breakdown, her adoring father who makes sure she has something to eat in the morning beyond her usual gulp of Hershey's syrup, her grandfather who teaches her to bash in the heads of the eels they catch on Long Island Sound, Uncle Guido who makes the annual bagna cauda, and the numerous aunts and cousins who parade through her life with love and food and endless stories of the old days. And then there's her brother, Tyler.

Smith's household was "different." Little Mary-Ann couldn't have friends over because her older brother, Tyler, an autistic before anyone knew what that meant, was unable to bear noise of any kind. To him, the sound of crying, laughing, phones ringing, or toilets flushing was "a cloud of barbed needles" flying into his face. Subject to such an assault, he would substitute that pain with another: he'd try to chew his arm off. Tyler was Mary-Ann's real-life Boo Radley, albeit one whose bookshelves sagged under the weight of the World War II books he collected and read obsessively.

Hanging over this rough-and-tumble American childhood is the sinister shadow of an approaching serial killer. The menacing Bob Malm lurks throughout this joyous and chaotic family portrait, and the havoc he unleashes when the paths of innocence and evil cross one early December evening in 1953 forever alters the landscape of Smith's childhood.

Girls of Tender Age is one of those books that will forever change its readers because of its beauty and power and remarkable wit.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Allison & Busby
• Date d'édition: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0749081287
• ISBN 13: 9780749081287
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 304