If You Like The Lovely Bones, You Should Try Dead on Town Line

Back in July, I read Waiting for Normal, a novel by Leslie Connor, an author with whom I had no prior familiarity. I found myself unable to put the book down and hoped that she had written other books as well. My search yielded two results: the picture book Miss Bridie Chose a Shovel and Dead on Town Line, a novel in verse. I have limited familiarity with this unusual form, the best other example I can give being Love That Dog, a lovely reflection on the power of poetry to shape young lives and aid in the grieving process. But while that explores some similar themes, it aims at a much younger audience.

Dead on Town Line is the story of a 16-year-old girl who is murdered. Just how, and by whom, we gradually discover as she reveals the details one poem at a time. Like Susie in The Lovely Bones, Cassie Devlin speaks to us from beyond the grave, but instead of inhabiting some celestial almost-heaven while she awaits closure, she remains at the scene of the crime, occasionally feeling a tug leading her to "the next" but unable to follow while those who loved her search for her in vain.

Through Connor's carefully crafted free verse, we get to know Cassie, a girl similar in some ways to Addie, the 11-year-old narrator of Waiting for Normal. Both girls are compassionate, eager to extend kindness to the marginalized. Both live alone with their mothers, though unlike Addie, Cassie enjoys a tranquil home life with a mom who is entirely capable and devoted. Perhaps most of all, Cassie and Addie are united by their love of music. While Addie plays the flute, Cassie is a pianist, and a composer to boot. Her most precious possession is Morning of the Moths, a work in progress and the object at the heart of her untimely demise.

Cassie's poems are short, generally one or two pages long with terse titles printed in all capital letters. Connor is quite as successful at capturing a teenager's voice as an 11-year-old's. We also hear another young woman speak frequently. Waiting with Cassie is Birdie, a Southern, dark-skinned mother-to-be who was also buried nearby, more than sixty years earlier. Murdered by the man who impregnated her, she is dour from years of abuse and neglect and merely wants solitude in her afterlife.

But Cassie is curious, and eventually Birdie begins to open up as together, they explore the possibility of manipulating the matter around them, reminding me of Sam and the spooky longtime subway dweller in Ghost. There's nothing quite so dramatic as avalanches of paperwork or invisible fingers on a keyboard, but they find that a gentle, well-directed breeze can have a powerful impact.

Other characters come to light as well. Kyle, the gentle boyfriend upon whom suspicion rests. Abel Sorrenson, the music teacher and mentor who searches most diligently. Gail Sherman, the problem student Cassie took into her Composer's Workshop. Jory, her cowed brother. Mrs. Devlin, whose life is empty without the daughter who defined it. And from many years before, the corrupt preacher who kept Birdie in a state of near-slavery and the unborn infant who vanished while her mother stayed.

The decision to include Birdie adds considerable depth to the story. It gives Cassie someone to converse with; it presents two girls who have been burned by previous relationships slowly building a friendship with one another. Learning to trust again, which is particularly difficult for Birdie, who has not had love in her life for a very long time, if ever. It's a gruesome tale in some ways, with two murders described and frequent discussion of bones and blood and death. But for all that, the reflections, often tinged with the extended metaphor of music, have beauty.

"Death's hard to explain," Cassie tells us early in the book. "Even now, / When I should know. / It reminds me of / A dog bite..." She goes on to recall her experience of being bitten and watching the resulting bruise grow ever darker. "I was almost relieved / To find out: / Okay. / So this is a / Dog bite. / And okay, / So this is / Death. / But like the bruising, / More seems to be coming. / Being dead / Isn't being done."

I don't know whether Connor was influenced at all by The Lovely Bones, but despite slightly different approaches, the two books cover enough of the same territory with similarly lyrical writing for me to suspect that those who like one will enjoy the other. Dead on Town Line is much shorter at just over 130 pages, with empty spaces, full-page illustrations in stark black-and-white and lines scarcely more than a few words long. I read it in little more than an hour, but it again cemented in my mind the fact that Connor is a writer of great talent and heart whose name I intend to seek out on library shelves for years to come.

Leslie Connor Celebrates Immigrants in Miss Bridie Chose a Shovel

Last month, I read Leslie Connor's Waiting for Normal, an excellent middle grade novel about a pre-teen girl whose optimism allows her to rise above the adversity of her chaotic home life. At one point in the book, the young protagonist, Addie, is given an album containing songs about people emigrating from Ireland to America. When I went looking to see if Connor had written any other books, I discovered that immigration was at the heart of her picture book, Miss Bridie Chose a Shovel.

This book, which is illustrated by Mary Azarian, reminds me of Donald Hall's Ox-Cart Man, about a pioneering farmer who spends his year working the farm in anticipation of his big trip to town to sell his goods, thus earning enough money to get through the next year. In this case, the central object is not a cart but a shovel. Bridie is the name of the young woman who heads for America in 1856 with just one object in tow. She can take only one thing with her, so she chooses something practical, and the book demonstrates how the shovel is of use to her throughout her life.

Its uses are many: to lean on when the waves get too rocky on the boat ride to America; to help her dig a little garden behind the shop where she works upon her arrival; to heap coals into the stove in later years when she is cooking for her family. It's because she has the shovel that she is able to clear away the snow on the pond in the city park, making an ice skating rink where she first catches the eye of the man who will become her husband. Every significant landmark in her life is somehow tied to that tool, for which she finds so many purposes.

Azarian's illustrations have an old-fashioned look to them and are somewhat stylized, with thick outlines that make the pictures remind me of stained glass windows. Each page has between one and three fairly long sentences, all narration. There's a nice circular pattern to the book, with it starting and ending with essentially the same sentence and with Bridie using the shovel for similar purposes in her youth and old age.

"She could have picked a chiming clock or a porcelain figurine," Connor writes, "but Miss Bridie chose a shovel back in 1856." Offering that contrast emphasizes Bridie's work ethic and practicality. Had she taken some type of heirloom, she might have been able to sell it and use the money to help establish herself, but we never get the sense that she regrets her decision. She makes do with what she has, using it to help create a thriving homestead.

This book covers a span of many years, so not only is there the sadness of Bridie leaving her family behind, there is also a death toward the end of the book, not to mention a fire that wipes out the barn. There is a definite harshness to the book, but as in Waiting for Normal, the protagonist's resilience keeps readers from getting bogged down in despair. Miss Bridie is a woman who perseveres no matter what challenges come her way, and her story is a tribute to generations of hard-working immigrants.

Addie Schmeeter's Resolve Helps Her Get By While She's Waiting for Normal

Several months ago, I read Linda Urban's A Crooked Kind of Perfect, a middle-grade novel about a girl named Zoe learning to play the organ and to adjust to the many times in her life when things don't go just as planned. The young narrator faces disappointments, but she always manages to overcome them, with some help from her small circle of close family and friends. I found myself reminded of Zoe this week when I read Waiting for Normal, another middle-grade novel by Leslie Connor. It, too, is narrated by a spunky young aspiring musician who occasionally longs for a much different life. Addie Schmeeter doesn't dream of Carnegie Hall; she yearns for normalcy, which she explains as "being able to count on certain things. Good things. And it's having everyone together - just because they belong that way."

Addie is 12 years old, a couple of years older than Zoe, and the challenges she faces are so severe that most readers might well marvel that she is such an optimistic, compassionate, well-adjusted child. In the first of 49 short chapters ranging in length from two to 12 pages, she and her mother - Mommers to her and her half-sisters, Denise to everyone else - move into a tiny trailer in an empty lot in Schenechtady, New York. Immediately, her mother launches into a tirade of complaints about the home that her ex-husband, Dwight, has provided for them, but where Denise sees "a tin box on a tar patch," Addie sees possibility. She finds the miniature kitchen charming - just her size, which is fitting, since most of the time, she's the only one who uses it. She likes the bunk bed at the head of the trailer with the curtain that closes for privacy and the view of the stretch of grass sprinkled with flowers. And she loves the fact that just across the parking lot is a gas station run by a large, maternal woman named Soula and her best friend, a jovial neatnik named Elliot.

At school, Addie soon makes more friends, bonding with the delicate Marissa and the portly Helena and eventually getting on chummy terms with Robert, though she initially terms him a "reprobate" for welcoming her to the school by offering her an ice cream sandwich he had just squished. She also likes Ms. Rivera, the orchestra leader at school who gives Addie her flute music early to accommodate her slow learning process; while Addie doesn't discover this until much later, those familiar with the condition are likely to quickly recognize in her the signs of dyslexia. Though school is difficult for her, Addie makes the necessary adjustments that allow her to get through her classes, though she is embarrassed that she doesn't, as Mommers says, have the "Love of Learning". One of her methods of combating this is creating a vocabulary notebook, which she fills with every big word she encounters.

For Addie, this is a year of big changes and eye-opening experiences. She discovers that Soula, who affectionately calls her "Cookie," is fighting for her life, and that the cure for her disease is almost as harrowing as the disease itself. She meets Rick, the owner of a nearby greasy spoon, and learns that he and Elliot are a couple. She undergoes the uncomfortable beginnings of puberty, and the experience is worsened by her mother's insensitivity. Mommers is the reason that Addie has such a deep desire for a normal life. There's nothing normal about having to catalog the food in the nearly-empty cupboard and ration it out because her mom has been absent for days and she doesn't know when she's coming back. There's nothing normal about having to be almost totally self-sufficient because Mommers spends all of her time glued to a chat room or away on "business meetings". Nothing normal about her mother having nothing but derision for almost everyone Addie loves, from Soula and Piccolo, Addie's pet hamster, to Grandio, whose son, Addie's father, died when she was three, and Dwight. Especially Dwight, the gentle man who has been as good as a father to her for almost as long as she can remember.

As the year progresses, it becomes increasingly painful to watch her put on a brave face and take care of her train wreck of a mother while secretly longing to be taken care of herself. Visits with 6-year-old Brynna and 3-year-old Katie (collectively called the Littles) and Dwight become especially rare after he moves out of town to renovate a mansion in the country. When Addie is able to pay them a visit for several days over Thanksgiving, she learns that Dwight has fallen in love again, and Hannah is everything her mother is not: stable, affectionate, reasonable. Before the weekend is out, Addie loves her too, but she aches to think of Dwight starting another family, one that definitively does not include her. Returning from that den of warmth and laughter to her cold, empty trailer is so crushing that Addie begins to wonder whether it might be better to cut them out of her life entirely and concentrate all of her resolve into getting Mommers back on her feet. But how much responsibility can a 12-year-old be expected to shoulder?

Leslie Connor has crafted a book that is at once desperately sad and relentlessly hopeful. Addie's remarkable ability to look on the bright side of life makes her a heroine who is very easy to root for, and after nearly 300 pages in her head, some of that can-do attitude might just rub off on the reader. Because of some of the mature issues that arise, I'd recommend Waiting for Normal to a slightly older readership than A Crooked Kind of Perfect; I wouldn't go any younger than 10, and parents of pre-teens may want to preview the book for themselves so that they can be better prepared to discuss some of these topics. Addie is a girl who must deal with more troubles than any child should, but her capacity to find the best in each situation helps her to rise above adversity. Look through her eyes, and you'll come to appreciate just how beautiful normal can be.