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More copies of this ISBN:This title in other formats:Girls of Tender Age: A Memoirby Mary-Ann Tirone Smith
Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments: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. Review:"The recovery of repressed memories of the 1953 murder by a serial killer of an 11-year-old friend and neighbor in a blue-collar enclave in Hartford, Conn., triggered Smith's absorbing memoir. In recalling her childhood, she is compelled to describe her upbringing in a fractured family whose existence centered on placating her older brother, Tyler, an autistic boy who couldn't bear sounds of any kind (crying, laughing, sneezing, dog barking). The narrative is further enriched by the author's investigations into the life and crimes of the psychopath who preyed on her friend and other little girls, and by her insights about the unequal rights of girls and women before feminism. The making of a writer is the subtext here; forbidden by her strict Catholic upbringing to question her parents, Smith was forced to develop her imagination. She was blessed with a nurturing father, who was the lifesaving antidote to her cold, selfish mother. Smith's ironic narrative voice, familiar to readers of her Poppy Rice mysteries and her sensitive and witty novels, serves her well. Larger than the sum of its parts, this book illuminates a social class as it recounts a tangled story of a family and a crime. Photos. Agent, Molly Friedrich. (Jan. 11)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review:"A neighborhood map appears at the beginning of the book, but the engrossing text makes clear that evil can never be charted accurately enough." Booklist Review:"The childhood memories are great fun; the crime reporting workmanlike; the portrait of the adult relationships touching." Kirkus Reviews Review:"Girls of Tender Age is a very good story. It gives the reader unexpected insight into the making of that most exposed of outsiders — the writer." Cleveland Plain Dealer Review:"With intelligence, disarming humor and deep affection for the families and the neighborhoods of the 1950s, Girls of Tender Age speaks eloquently on behalf of children and confronts the crippling silences that damage us in any era." Washington Post Review:"Like David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Girls of Tender Age peers into the dark spaces between the street lights in a quiet residential neighborhood." New York Times Review:"[S]lowly and skillfully, as if crafting a handmade quilt, Smith takes the raw material of this all-American tale and weaves into the pattern a jagged thread..." San Fransisco Chronicle Review:"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 Review:"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 Review:"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 About the AuthorMary-Ann Tirone Smith is the author of eight novels. She has lived all her life in Connecticut, except for two years when she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon. What Our Readers Are SayingAdd a comment for a chance to win!
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