The Silver Star

April 15, 2013
Readers of Walls’s bestselling memoir The Glass Castle may find this new novel too familiar to be entirely satisfying. When 12-year-old Bean Holladay and her 15-year-old sister, Liz, are abandoned by their narcissistic, unstable mother, Charlotte, they make their way to Byler, Va., Charlotte’s hometown, in search of an uncle they barely know. In Byler, Bean and Liz find not only their uncle, Tinsley, but also a community eager to see how Charlotte’s girls have turned out. The sisters attract particular attention from Jerry Maddox, foreman at the town mill, which the Holladays owned and operated in better times. Walls understands in her bones how growing up with a mentally ill parent can give children extraordinary skills and resilience but also leave them without any sense of the boundary between ordinary behavior and abuse. It’s clear from the beginning that Bean and Liz’s relationship with Maddox won’t end well, and their newfound family may not be able to sustain the damage. When Bean reads To Kill a Mockingbird in school, she seems like a long-lost cousin to Scout, and to the young Walls herself. The other characters are too often thinly conceived, but she makes for a strong and spunky protagonist. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, WME Entertainment.

Bean and Liz's selfish, deluded mother will seem familiar to the legions of Jeannette Walls fans. After being abandoned, the sisters travel cross-country to Byler, Virginia, to stay with their widowed and eccentric Uncle Tinsley. As narrator, Walls's spunky tone reflects Bean's inherent sense of fairness--and its lack of a filter. Despite his gruffness, Uncle Tinsley has a heart of gold. Bean meets relatives she didn't know she had, and their jocularity, optimism, and patriotism are clear in Walls's performance. As Liz and Bean work for mill foreman Jerry Maddox, his big talk makes it obvious that he's going to be a bad guy. The author's warm, funny reading makes for an uncomplicated but satisfying story in which justice is ultimately served. A.B. (c) AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine