Now available in paperback
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Now available in paperback |
““This is one of my favorite books of the year. Kimberly Olson Fakih perfectly captures the ways in which children see everything adults wish they would miss, and the intense effects those things, both the good and the bad, have on them as they grow. From beginning to end, Kimmy is a character that drives home that the adults around her continuously let her and her siblings down, and sometimes with a row of sorrows and a journal of broken things, it is up to the child to stop generational curses and step up to bring the little miseries to the light.””
“This is the best Bildungsroman I’ve ever read. Fakih expertly captured the cracks of Midwestern life, the subtleties of human mannerisms, and the truly terrifying experience of growing up a girl in a world with horrors both near and far. The writing was superb and I didn’t want to stop reading.”—Clarisse Jorah, bookseller, Literati bookstore, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Publishers Weekly, October 26, 2022
Children’s book author Fakih (High on the Hog) makes her adult debut with this sharp depiction of a Midwestern girl’s coming-of-age.
Kimmy grows up in late 1960s Iowa surrounded by markers of her family’s former fortune as seed magnates. In a series of vignettes, Kimmy, her parents, and two siblings suffer a litany of bad experiences ranging from the quotidian (her mom forces her into dark clothes to “slenderize” her larger figure) to traumatic (a seemingly friendly man nearly kills all the children during an erratic boat trip). As well, Kimmy suspects her grandfather is sexually abusing her younger sister, but her chain-smoking, short-fused mother dismisses the concern. Fakih’s vivid depictions of Kimmy’s adolescent dilemmas blend nostalgia for the period with a visceral sense of her protagonist’s pain, as Kimmy fixates, without really understanding the details, on the real-life murder of Pamela Powers; longs for her mother to appreciate her; and crushes on a dad whose family she babysits for. Despite the lack of a central arc, each episode ably captures Kimmy’s grappling with her place in the world amid adult secrets. Though readers will find the structure lacking, the depiction of a teen navigating a confusing phase of life rings true.
Kirkus Reviews, October 12, 2022
A young girl growing up in 1960s Iowa learns that grown-ups are rarely what they seem.
The Castle family name once meant greatness—or, rather, a particular sort of Midwest greatness, when their seeds were sold all over Iowa and their name adorned signs and silos everywhere they looked. But the Castle family of the 1960s, as seen through the eyes of the middle child, narrator Kimmy, no longer lives in the big house on the hill that they still drive by every Christmas Eve. Instead, Mr. Castle is a church deacon and a mortgage broker with a scotch- and cigarette-loving wife and three children: plump, bookish Kimmy, older brother Paul, and little Nellie. While the book is labeled a novel, it reads much more like a collection of linked stories or personal essays, its string of vignettes taking place mostly during Kimmy’s tween years. They recount Kimmy’s eyes first opening to the rules and constrictions that govern the lives of the adults around her, from the gym teacher who unleashes his cruelty upon two of Kimmy’s classmates to Kimmy’s cadre of grandparents and extended family in Des Moines. Though many of these figures appear in lower-stakes anecdotes (such as the disappointment Kimmy experiences when family friends skip out on a shared holiday tradition to stay at home with their new color TV), the book’s main throughline shows how catastrophic the secret world of grown-ups can truly be on the delicate web that is a family. Fakih’s book, her first for adults, will appeal to anyone who looks back on their own childhood with a mixture of nostalgia and horror.
Despite the book's unwieldy structure, it shows Fakih as a gifted chronicler of children's helplessness and familial angst.