From the back cover:

"When Haven Kimmel was born in 1965, Mooreland, Indiana, was a sleepy little hamlet of three hundred people. Nicknamed "Zippy" for the way she would bolt around the house, this small girl was possessed of big eyes and even bigger ears. In this witty and lovingly told memoir, Kimmel takes readers back to a time when small-town America was caught in the amber of the innocent postwar period - people helped their neighbors, went to church on Sunday, and kept barnyard animals in their backyards.

Laced with fine storytelling, sharp wit, dead-on observations, and moments of sheer joy, Haven Kimmel's straight-shooting portrait of her childhood gives us a heroine who is wonderfully sweet and sly as she navigates the quirky adult world that surrounds Zippy."

I bought this book to take to the 2007 BC Convention in Charleston SC. It's a gift for a friend (but she doesn't know) who'll also be there. :)

A lovely RABCK from RealBookWorm on her birthday. Here she is with her darling husband. Thanks for spoiling me with the goodies from my wish list, RBW!

Twice I've written a brilliant journal entry, and twice I've erased it. So I'm going to write a little bit, and hit save. And then write a bit more and hit save again. Sorry, RBW, you'll only get one alert saying I've sent a partial entry!

What a great book! I read it yesterday on my flights home from the convention -- Charleston to Chicago, and Chicago - home. Twice while I was reading it, I thought of people I'd like to share it with, but can't remember now who they were. hmmmm ... I'm blaming it on sleep deprivation!

Anyway, this is a truly charming book. Every good thing you've read about it is true. Although it takes place in "the good old days" in middle America, it's not all soppy and smarmy. It's entertaining, a bit sarcastic, pokes fun at itself, and is all around fun to read. One of the critics said it reads like fiction, and that's totally accurate!

I'm going to quote one of the blurbs inside the cover here, mainly because I'm a mark-the-interesting-passages person too:

While reading A Girl Named Zippy, I started to dog-ear each page that contained a charming anecdote, a garden-fresh metaphor, a characterization shrewd as those from Spoon River, or a madeleine substitute worthy of Proust. My copy soon came to resemble a cone. A Girl Named Zippy seems to be just about the cleverest little memoir ever. I’ve told every friend I own to get a copy, and I find myself suddenly frantic to make new friends.
-New York Newsday

It was good that I read that before jumping into the book, because I didn’t waste my time trying to rip up my boarding pass into a million little tiny bookmarks. That said, I do have a couple parts to quote here.

I'm going to re-type pretty much all of page 174 here. I just LOVE the way this is written:

Christmas was my favorite time of the year, in part because of the excellent speech, "Fear not: I bring you good tidings of great joy ..." and because of the song "The Little Drummer boy." Anything that involved such persistent percussion was undoubtedly oth religious and true.

... In the painting, which glowed from a fluroescent light bulb hung beneath it, the Big Jesus looks pensive and honey-eyed. His shoulder-length, light-brown hair is as clean and shiny as corn silk, and he has a beautiful tan. He is not scorched like a farmer, but bronzed, like a lifeguard. He way better looking than either Glen Campbell or Engelbert Humperdinck.

...it appeared that everyone around me was flat-out in love with him, and who wouldn't be? He was good with animals, he loved his mother, and he wasn't afraid of blind people.

I didn't buy the bit about his terrible death and resurrection for a minute. I knew, beyond any room for doubt, that nothing in this world is both alive and dead. And this was the thing I most wanted to say in church: if you want him to be alive, you've got to stop hanging him on that cross.

And then there's a childhood experience I share with the author:

In addition to all the humiliations I was heir to, when Mom made me a dress that I would have rather eaten hominy than wear, I was forced to try it on while it still had pins in it. Whoever thought of such a thing? In a normal world, if I had said to my mom that I was just going to slip on these jeans and this T-shirt, which p.s. were full of straight pins, she would have felt my head for a fever.

My friend DMA7 emailed me this week to see if I had any good reading material for her, so I brought this with me on my business trip to NYC today. I hope she loves it as much as I did!

Thank you my FF Antof9 for this lovely book. Quite refreshing particularly from a girl who was East Coast borned and bred. It reminded me of simpler times gone by-riding your bike, Easter sunrise service, adult quirks from a child's point of view.
Passing on to your Boss KW as requested.