The Girl in the Well Is Me

Rivers (Finding Ruby Starling) adheres to the advice that fiction writers "give their characters trouble" in this psychological horror story. Over a day and night trapped in a well, Kammie Summers, 11, recounts a horrific year. After her father's incarceration for a heinous crime, a beloved relative dies of cancer, and a bus kills the family dog outside their New Jersey home (which the bank is repossessing). The Summers relocate to "Nowheresville," Texas, exchanging a life of plasma-screen TVs and horseback-riding lessons for a trailer where Kammie shares a bedroom with a brother who doesn't like her anymore. Asthmatic Kammie doles out the details of her downward mobility while the mean girls who tricked her into falling into the well look down and laugh. Rivers writes intense scenes of hallucinatory prose as the sky darkens, and oxygen deprivation causes Kammie to imagine dead goats beneath her feet, spiders attacking her legs, and the company of a French-speaking coyote. The stream-of-consciousness narration recalls Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," but claustrophobics will probably want to read something else. Ages 10-13. Agent: Jennifer Laughran, Andrea Brown Literary Agency. (Mar.)

Gr 4-6--Kammie Summers is wedged partway down a well shaft, unable to move her arms and possibly running low on oxygen. In a funny, surreal, occasionally heartbreaking stream-of-consciousness narrative, Kammie ponders the clique of girls whose mean-spirited initiation ritual caused her fall down the well and who don't feel as much urgency about her rescue as Kammie (and readers) might hope. She contemplates her mother, frazzled from working two jobs; her father, in prison for embezzling money from a children's charity; and the fallout from her dad's terrible decisions, including their move to the backwater town where her attempts to make friends led to this catastrophe. Kammie's spiky but sympathetic narration yields a compulsively readable story, traveling swiftly from friendship woes to sibling conflict to conversations with the silver Francophone coyote she hallucinates as the oxygen situation deteriorates. Rivers provides Kammie--along with the coyote and some unfriendly zombie goats--authentic feelings of guilt, anger, loneliness, and self-pity about her circumstances in and out of the immediate danger of the well. Though the book confronts both the specter of death and the reality of parental betrayal, Rivers has a middle grade audience in mind; the tangential meandering keeps the pacing snappy, and Kammie emerges from the well reasonably intact. The narrative falters at the very end as uplifting resolutions come too easily, but middle grade readers likely won't mind the rosy lens. VERDICT An unusual story with uncommonly truthful emotions.--Robbin E. Friedman, Chappaqua Library, NY