Starred Review ALA Booklist

Starred Review I expect you might think the story . . . is perversely gothic in some unhealthy way, begins narrator Ivy, and despite her protestations that what follows is a plain and true small-town story, readers will quickly discover that Gantos adheres faithfully to the gothic novel's elements and utterly shatters the boundaries between the sacrosanct and the perverse. Identical albino twins Abner and Adolph Rumbaugh are an oddity in their small Pennsylvania town, but as a child, Ivy adores the elderly pair and spends free hours playing at their pharmacy. Then she discovers their family curse warped, overwhelming love for their deceased mother, which drives them to horrifying acts to preserve her memory. As Ivy grows older, the twins' terrifying secret begins to make sense, and her own ties to the curse become clear. The intimations of incest, the details of mutilated corpses, a bizarre sex scene, and the story's creepy plotline may raise plenty of eyebrows and limit the book's audience, and lengthy passages explaining the curse may slow some readers. Still, teens (and college students) who have studied the gothic novel tradition will find many familiar, skillfully re-created elements in the tale, along with provocative questions about free will and genetic engineering, while horror fans will admire the author's ability to ably en gleefully in such a shocking, darkly comic tale.

Horn Book

The debate over nature versus nurture undergoes morbidly compelling scrutiny in this twisted tale. The Rumbaugh family curse causes some sons to become overly devoted to their mothers; young Ivy is convinced that she, although female, has inherited the curse. Gantos keeps this story from becoming an all-out freak show by posing provocative questions about whether it's possible to escape one's genes.

Kirkus Reviews

What happens when you die? Do you molder in the grave, return zombie-like or completely healed, or go to heaven and recline on the clouds? Your return is of a different sort if you're the mother of 71-year-old emotionally stunted twin taxidermists suffering from the family curse of obsessive mother love. And young Ivy Spirco's unsettling discovery in the basement of the pharmacy impels her to ponder these issues of life and death and shakes her own obsessive "Mom and mini-Mom" relationship. Always adept at creating exuberant, larger-than-life characters, Gantos here creates two who are even larger than death, in a psychological horror story of the highest order. Akin to Frankenstein , Dracula and Poe's stories in theme, tone and voice, this offering explores such philosophical issues as nature versus nurture, free will and predetermination, mortality immortality and rebirth, in a totally engaging, intelligently written work guaranteed to either entrance or repel readers. Like Mrs. Rumbaugh's body, this will linger in one's darkest corners. A good match with M.T. Anderson's Feed (2002) and Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion (2002). (Fiction. YA)

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Are personalities determined by genes or by environment? Is it possible to love one's mother too much? Is there really such a thing as free will? Can curses be passed down from one generation to the next? These are some of the questions raised in Gantos's (<EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key) black comedy in which teenager Ivy Spirco makes some disturbing discoveries about her heritage. The elderly Rumbaugh twins, two identical men who run the pharmacy where Ivy's mother used to work, have fascinated Ivy since she was a girl. It comes as quite a shock to her when on her 16th birthday Ivy learns that one of the twins—either Adolph or Abner—is her biological father. Even more unnerving to her is the possibility that she may have inherited the "Rumbaugh curse"—obsessive mother love. Ivy would be the first to admit that she deeply adores her mother, but will she follow in the twins' footsteps, attempting to preserve her mother's body for all eternity? Geared for a sophisticated audience familiar with the gothic genre, this offbeat novel, reflecting elements of <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">Psycho and Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," draws readers into a macabre world where taboos are lifted and unconventional desires unleashed. Unfortunately, the philosophical points made by the author are far less vivid and memorable as the image of old Mrs. Raumbaugh's dried-up corpse, painstakingly immortalized by her twin sons. Ages 12-up. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(May)

School Library Journal

Gr 8 Up-In this bizarre tale entrenched in genetics and human history, familial love is unabashedly and horrifically skewed, twisted, and swathed, reminiscent of the works of Poe, Shelley, and Hawthorne. Readers are introduced to the young woman narrator when she is seven, trapped in a small town and a victim of a family's dark legacy: a maternal obsession so extreme that it preys upon the minds of its maligned descendants, forcing them to pursue any means necessary to keep their mothers with them always. Ivy and her devout mother live across the street from a pair of reclusive, elderly twin brothers who run the pharmacy. Her mother used to work for the Rumbaughs, and, over the years, Ivy comes to understand her connection to the eccentric men, their deep bond with their now-deceased mother, and their fascination with the art of taxidermy, which they share with her. Soon Ivy finds herself engrossed in embalming squirrels, kittens, chickens, and whatever else she can get her hands on. They become her tools and totems to assuage her maternal-loss anxieties. Readers can only fumble and squirm through her distorted yet straightforwardly told horror story with a combination of shock, disbelief, and dread of what no doubt will come. Gantos has written an eerie, nearly perverse gothic tale of love and devotion gone completely and frighteningly haywire. This thought-provoking story about free will and the arguments of nature and nurture will definitely stick with readers, no matter how hard they try to forget it.-Hillias J. Martin, New York Public Library Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Voice of Youth Advocates (Tue Feb 28 00:00:00 CST 2023)

Gantos turns toward the gothic in his newest novel, the story of Ivy Spirco, who throughout her life, has remained achingly devoted to her mother and with whom she has shared an uneasy relationship with their small town's aging, mysterious, identical twin pharmacists, the Rumbaughs. As a six-year-old girl, Ivy makes a startling discovery in the twins' basement: The Rumbaughs have stuffed and preserved their beloved dead mother's body. Ivy is intrigued and repelled by this discovery, and when her mother later reveals that Ivy's absent and "unknown" father is one of the twins (even her mother is unsure which), Ivy is convinced that the loyalty and love she feels for her own mother is the product of a genetic curse. Gantos's prose represents a departure from his earlier Jack Henry novels, and although reflective, remains slightly distant in tone, more closely resembling the work of M. E. Kerr than Lemony Snicket. The novel's central conflict appears to be a stylized nature-versus-nurture debate, but the point is not really driven home in an effectively chilling manner. As Ivy attempts to rid herself of the Rumbaugh family's curse of "mother love," she begins a unique hobby under the twins' tutelage: taxidermy. From the time young Ivy discovers the preserved Mrs. Rumbaugh, through her amateur attempts to stuff her first squirrel, to her entry in various local taxidermy competitions, the novel's end can be predicted. The "stuffed" human and the automaton are established tropes of the gothic; here, however, the figures' presences are almost predictable. Gantos' novel is topically creepy; however, a better stylistic treatment of the gothic can be found in Phillip Pullman's Clockwork (Scholastic, 1998/VOYA December 1998).-Amy S. Pattee.