Carolyn Marsden
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Take Me With YouREVIEWS: Booklist-- STARRED REVIEW Marsden, who has written about children in Asia and Africa, now goes somewhere different, both in time and place: Italy after World War II. Pina and Susanna have lived at their Naples orphanage since they were babies. Best friends, they tolerate the nuns, find pleasure where they can, and hope fervently that one day they’ll be adopted into loving families. Pina, pretty and blond, should have been adopted long ago. She is sure the nuns tell prospective parents she is bad. Susanna has her own challenge. She is the daughter of an Italian woman and a black American sailor, a nero; no one looks like her. Then two very different parents come into the girls’ lives. One appears, the other is found, and both satisfy the girls’ dreams in unexpected ways. Marsden often puts crafts like sewing or crocheting into her stories, and in many respects she is like a master craftsman, using words instead of stitches for her deceptively simple design. The embellishments come in the sensory details of life in the orphanage, on the street, and with the particulars of religious life. There is even a touch of mysticism when the orphans are taken to a mass conducted by the sainted Padre Pio. Perhaps it is he who performs Pina’s miracle, but in any case, his well-known philosophic statement beautifully sums up this book: “Pray, hope, and don’t worry.” — Ilene Cooper Publishers' Weekly: Take Me with You Carolyn Marsden. Candlewick, $14.99 (176p) ISBN 978-0-7636-3739-2 Marsden (The Gold-Threaded Dress) again deftly weaves a multicultural thread into her fiction. A decade after the end of WWII, best friends Susanna and Pina are being raised by nuns in a Naples home for girls who were abandoned as babies. Convinced that their parents must be dead since they haven't come for them, the girls long to be adopted, but prospective parents haven't selected either of them. Golden-haired Pina thinks her mischievous behavior is the problem, while Susanna believes her dark skin is to blame. Though each discovers she has a birth parent alive, the author realistically steers clear of a pat, feel-good resolution. After a letter arrives from her father, an American sailor who's on a tour of duty, Susanna plaintively wonders, “Why would a father not drop everything to hurry to his daughter?” Pina holds out hope when she learns that her mother lives nearby yet can't care for her and has withheld permission for her daughter to be adopted (“I belong to someone. Someday my mother will come”). It's a poignant novel, enriched by expressive writing and credible characters. Ages 10–up. (Mar.) |
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