EricaO

I wonder if I should have started with some of Kagen's newer works and then read my way backward? In retrospect, reading her first novel first may not have been my most clever move.

The story, here, is what my pals and I call "Fine and Perfect" which means it was ok but I don't really want to talk about it.
I'm still going to talk about it, though.

Alright. So. The story. It's a fun, quick summer suspense featuring a ten-year-old girl in 1959 Milwaukee who believes she will be the next victim of a child rapist/murderer. No,that doesn't sound fun but, despite the child raping and murdering and the leaving of the bodies down by the park, it's pretty light-hearted. In addition, the girl - Sally O'Malley (yes, really) - and her just-a-bit-younger sister, Troo, are essentially abandoned for the summer while their mother is dying in the hospital and their stepfather is getting into bar brawls and staying at the waitress' house most nights. But don't worry, it's not as depressing as it sounds. There's an older sister who tries to pitch in when not doing what teenage girls do in the summer and a cop who shows a little too much interest in Sally and a zoo with a gorilla named Samson.

Delightful characters are introduced (Ethel), the sense of community that I think many of us yearn for runs rampant through the pages, sparking nostalgia both real and imagined, and the mystery of who has been kidnapping, abusing, then murdering little girls is solved. That all makes for a pleasant read.

The thing that marred my pleasant read, though, was Sally, the narrator and protagonist.
I had a hard time following her tale because the narration is fashioned after the thoughts of a ten-year-old city girl in the swell '50's. The thing is, though, kids can be pretty clear, especially when telling their stories. It may not sound like it from an adult perspective, but ten-year-olds usually understand the concept of flow and consistency. Normally, if things get muddled during a child's rendition of her life, you just ask for clarification and get the kid to set things straight. In a book, the reader can't ask for clarification so a child narrator is a tricky thing; getting the voice of a ten-year-old to come across without tangling the story is hard. And, in this case, I don't think it was successful.
Sally sounded like a child written from an adult's point-of-view, meaning "This is how grown-ups think children think"; she didn't feel authentic; it was if she had been pared down to the most basic child-like form and then dressed in clever kid-like thoughts that had adult undertones making her faux-precocious and simultaneously overly innocent and completely not genuine.
Adding to that is her inconsistent voice. Her sentimentality for the Sky King starts out over-the-top, then goes away altogether, then pops back up at the end. (There are numerous, unnecessary asides in parentheses but they bunch up together in some chapters and then go missing for many chapters only to suddenly appear again). Her inner monologue isn't even consistent. On and off throughout the beginning chapters, she's all lazy speech, all the time - she's gonna, he coulda, she's runnin', we woulda, they're laughin' - but then that stops and her speech begins to even out, flow better, reads more smoothly, and then suddenly she jerks back to the beginning chapters again. I kept getting thrown out of the story every time that happened.

I ran into other problems - like Ethel. She turns out to be an awesome character but I'd just assumed she was another kid, albeit a little older than Sally and her sister, with whom they liked to hang. No, it turns out she's a full-on adult and she's black and she works as a caretaker for a little old lady. I found that out in chapter 20. I'd been picturing her as just some 14-year-old that did good deeds. It was jarring to have to re-imagine her halfway through the book when she becomes an important character.
Switching from honorifics to first names and back was also very confusing. Mrs. Callahan was Mrs. Callahan and then Betty but then back to Mrs. Callahan all in the same paragraph, making me wonder who the hell Betty was and why she'd popped up when we were talking about Mrs. Callahan? It took me a few minutes to realize that this ten-year-old is calling Mrs. Callahan by her first name. Did ten-year-olds who were raised to be all proper and crap do that in 1959? Did they think of people as both Mr/Mrs as well as by their first names? I don't know if they did, or not, but switching back and forth like that certainly messed with the flow of the story.
And the killer. At the end, he goes all psycho and weird and I have to admit I rolled my eyes through the entire scene.
These were all problems for me.

So to sum up: While I liked the idea of the overarching story, the little inconsistencies and my inability to believe in Sally O'Malley as a ten-year-old got in my way and I couldn't enjoy the story as much as I'd have liked.