Unwrapping...
Authored by Karen Rivers
Middle Grade
Grade 5+
Praise for the book...
A top 10 Spring 2016 Kids' Indie Next Pick
"A brilliantly revealed, sometimes even funny, exploration of courage, the will to live, and the importance of being true to oneself. The catastrophe draws readers in, and the universality of spunky Kammie's life-affirming journey will engage a wide audience. Moving, suspenseful,and impossible to put down."
-Kirkus Reviews, starred review
" I dare you to pick up this riveting novel without reading straight through to its heart-stopping conclusion. Karen Rivers has penned a dazzling voice, at once hilarious, heartbreaking, and searingly honest. The girl in the well is a triumph."
-Katherine Applegate, Newberry Medal-winning author of The One and Only Ivan
" A gripping story that doesn't shy away from the dark places but explores them with heart, humor, and light."
-Kate Massner, author of All The Answers
"Funny, surreal, occasionally heartbreaking...a compulsively readable story."
-School Library Journal
About the book...
I must admit I have to join the voices that admit they could not put this book down. From beginning to end it is written in such a fashion that you just have to turn the next page to find out what's coming at you next.
Kammie Summers is a young girl whose dad is sent to prison for embezzling money from his work, her dog is hit by a bus and dies, and her grandmother passes on. How much can an 11 year old take? Because of her dad's criminality her family is forced to move from New Jersey into a trailer located in Texas so they can be near her father's prison and visit him regularly. Her distraught and weary mom has to take on two menial jobs to enable the family to even exist and her brother acts like he hates her and is always putting her down.
She enters her new school determined to make a change in her life, to make new friends, and start all over again fresh and new. Unfortunately she picks the wrong girls to befriend. Three popular girls at the school pretend she can be their friend and be accepted into their group but they have no intention of bringing them into their circle and are only stringing her along so they can bully and belittle her.
They victimize her by cutting off her hair and part of her initiation is to stand on top of some old boards that are covering a disguarded well in an isolated spot. The decrepit boards snap and Kammie finds herself a prisoner in the well, stuck with her hands down at her sides and unable to climb out. She cries and pleads with the girls to help her but to no avail. Will they rescue her or take off and leave her there to die? Kammie is terribly frightened and thinks this will be the end of her.
The poor panicky girl is trapped in the dark, claustrophobic, and desperate to be rescued by anyone. As time ticks away she reminisces about her life, her relationships and what she has to do to survive this ordeal until someone finds her...if they ever do find her.
Kammie runs out of oxygen and her mind starts imagining bizarre things like a French-speaking coyote and goats that might be zombies. She has time to reflect on those so-called friends and how she will react and move forward with her life when (and if) she is saved.
The Girl in the Well is Me will be released March 15, 2016 and it tackles important issues from bullying and lying to the complexities of parent-child relationships and beyond. This novel, targeted perfectly for middle-school aged kids, will have readers laughing and crying over the course of its physically and emotionally suspenseful, utterly believable events.
I highly, highly recommend this book. It was a book I thoroughly enjoyed from cover to cover.
About the author...
Karen Rivers absolutely loves writing books told from the point of view of kids and teens. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, with her own kids, whose ideas she tries not to steal too often. She has two dogs, two fish, two birds, and two kids, because if one of something is good, then two of something must be twice as good. If she’s not writing, she’s probably reading, taking photos, attempting to weed her garden, or vacuuming up the dog hair in the house. Or, let’s face it, wasting time on the Internet, although all Internet time is not wasted time, because some of her best ideas come from random snippets she stumbles upon on Twitter. She spends a lot of time walking and thinking in the forest behind her house. One day, she hopes to own a hammock in which she will lie frequently, in the shade of the trees, and look up at the clouds and imagine even more people to write about and even more things for them to do.
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Read on and read always!
It's a wrap.
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