Trauma Queen

March 1, 2011
Marigold's mother, Becca, is a performance artist—the kind of artist who, when performing for her daughter's second-grade classmates, pours oil on herself to represent the United States, because it is guzzling oil and making a mess. Unfortunately, as Becca pursues her art, daughter Marigold gets hurt in the process. Speaking in an uneven, fragment-laden, first-person voice, Marigold tries to understand her mother's work and art, but she is unhinged when Becca uses the stage to get back at her best friend Emma's uptight mother. The two mothers could not be more different, and their soured relationship is the reason Marigold and her family has had to move in the middle of her seventh-grade year. Because Becca wants to fit in better with the mothers in this new school, she offers an improvisational acting class at Marigold's school. Becca's popular class is the catalyst for bringing warring social groups together. Peripheral characters, especially prairie-talking sister Kennedy and wise, calm Gram, help keep Marigold optimistic, even while she worries about her unpredictable mother and the damaged relationship with Emma. A downright confusing cover and an extraordinarily speedy peacemaking at the conclusion make this one a hard sell to its real audience—quirky middle-schoolers who are happy with their nonconformist status. Mother-daughter book clubs will have a lot to talk about, though. (Fiction. 10-14) 

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 1, 2011

Gr 6-8-Showing up for the first day at Crampton Middle School dressed for Pajama Day is only a bad thing if Pajama Day happened a month earlier. Marigold, who makes quite an impression in her monkey-print pajamas, is loathe to admit that she could have read the school's documentation, preferring to blame her performance-artist mother. Becca's art has been the cause of many problems and confrontations, including a very public performance about the mother of Marigold's best friend, which forced them to move. Her well-meaning but intrusive mother continues to embarrass her, particularly when she starts an improv club at school and several eighth graders sign up for it. Marigold experiences the shifting allegiances and infighting among her classmates but in the end makes friends and comes to appreciate her over-the-top mother, with help from her wise and supportive grandmother. Often funny, the story also shows how looking at people in a new light can change one's opinion of them.-Betsy Fraser, Calgary Public Library, Alberta, Canada

Copyright 2011 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.