The Trouble with Goats and Sheep by Joanna Cannon
Is the story of a neighborhood, one in which a woman goes missing. Grace (10 years old) and her friend Tilly decide to interview the people who live on their cul-de-sac and perhaps solve the mystery. What I liked about the book: the girls’ friendship, the out-of-the-mouths-of-babes wisdom, the descriptions and reasoning of adult situations from a child’s point of view. The book is about the everyday tragedies in everyone’s lives that we most often never hear about or take the time to understand. There’s nothing I really disliked, but the book moved a little slow and at one point I felt like “just tell us what the big secret is already!” All-in-all, a quick, enjoyable read.
What She Left Behind by Ellen Marie Wiseman
This book presents two parallel stories: Izzy, a foster child almost 18 whose mother is in prison for killing Izzy’s father (1995) helps her foster mother with a project at a closed, abandoned state hospital. Clara was committed to an insane asylum by her parents for dating the wrong man (1929). Izzy becomes captivated by Clara’s story. The asylum folks are over the top evil. And, the two stories eventually come together in an impossibly happy ending.
BUT, in the Afterword I learned that Wiseman wrote this story based on an actual project to piece together life stories of asylum inmates from their suitcases: The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic (by Darby Penny and Peter Stastny, photos by Lisa Rinzler). Oliver Sacks said this “Darby Penney and Peter Stastny’s careful historical (almost archaeological) and biographical reconstructions give us unique insight into these lives which would otherwise be lost and, indeed, unimaginable to the rest of us.”
And there's a fascinating website devoted to the Willard Suitcase exhibit.
So, I have another book on my list to read.
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