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Mountain life. North Carolina. Fiction.
Letters. Fiction.
North Carolina. History. 20th century. Fiction.
Twelve-year-old Arie Mae lives in the North Carolina mountains with her brothers and sisters, but what she longs for is a true, shining friend, someone with whom she can share her stories. So she begins writing to her cousin Caroline in Raleigh, whom she has never met. When two ladies begin a settlement school to teach the residents some important life skills, their reception is mixed, even within Arie Mae's own family ter all, they are content with their lives. Then some families from Baltimore come to be a part of the school, and Arie Mae finds who might be her true, shining friend in Tom, who walks with a limp but loves to explore. Told as a series of letters to the never-answering Caroline, Arie Mae's engaging, humorous, and insightful voice comes through beautifully. Appalachian life in the 1920s is poignantly conjured on the page, rich folklore is interspersed with everyday life, and the resolution is touching but not pat. Dowell's novel compares favorably with Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Faith, Hope, and Ivy June (2009) as a, well, shining example of historical fiction.
Horn BookArie Mae, twelve, wishes for "my own true friend." She writes letters to her cousin Caroline, but the letters go unanswered. Then Tom moves to town from the city, and Arie Mae finally has a partner in adventure. Set in North Carolina's mountains in the 1920s, this novel exploring friendship and country life is rich in regional dialect and a sense of place.
Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)Twelve-year-old Arie Mae Sparks is imaginative and full of energy-qualities that often translate to -awful strange- in her small mountain town in 1920s North Carolina. With the aim of cheering up her mother and making a much-needed friend, Arie Mae begins writing letters to a cousin she-s never met, the daughter of an estranged aunt. Her letters go unanswered, but in the meantime, Arie Mae meets a visiting boy named Tom. -Cousin Caroline, have you ever seen anyone who shined?- writes Arie Mae. -Well, this boy did. Even though he walked with a limp and was a little bit sideways, he was shining.- The two traipse through the woods, which are supposedly haunted by -haints,- but Tom-s heart condition could mean the loss of Arie Mae-s only friend. Arie Mae-s openheartedness and yearning for connection make for a deeply poignant story, one with a richly realized setting and cast. As Arie Mae begins to see her life in a new light, Dowell (
Gr 4-6 Arie Mae Sparks is pining for one true friend. Instead of waiting to see if one turns up, she sends a letter to a cousin she has never met, Caroline, whose mother left the mountains of North Carolina long ago. There is no reply but Arie Mae isn't easily deterred. She keeps writing about her family and all the local happenings. Two ladies have come to the mountains to both preserve the culture they find there and to improve the residents' lot in life by teaching them traditional crafts and life skills. These "songcatchers" love Arie Mae's mother's ballad singing, largely because those songs originated in the mountains. By the same token, they loathe anything new (like the songs Arie Mae's father is fiddling) because those will eventually dilute the unique local culture. Arie Mae finally finds a kindred spirit in Tom, a young boy with a twisted foot and a burning desire to be a news reporter, whose family is visiting from Baltimore. Arie Mae leads Tom to all the colorful places her home has to offer until Tom's mother warns her that Tom has a weak heart and shouldn't be traipsing about the mountains. Dowell's latest is a sweet story told through the protagonist's one sided correspondence, mixed with first person narrative. Arie Mae is a natural storyteller and the beauty and the simplicity of life in the mountains of North Carolina in the 1920's seeps through the pages. It's also a satisfying tale of mending fences. Kathy Cherniavsky, Ridgefield Library, CT
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Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)
School Library Journal (Fri Aug 01 00:00:00 CDT 2014)
Dear Cousin Caroline,
This morning I told Mama how I might have to run away and marry a bear if I don’t find someone to call my own true friend. These mountains are near to spilling over with children, and none of them is worth two cents. They are all too old or too young or just plain disappointing.
It’s the least fair thing in the world. James has got Will Maycomb down the road who is full of fun and mischief, and Lucille’s friend Ivadee is a year younger but seems just the same as Lucille, wanting to play House and School Teacher all the day long. Baby John is too young for friends, but when the time comes I am sure he will have a gracious plenty and I will still be sitting here on this porch by myself with so many things to say and not a one to say them to.
If you are a twelve-year-old girl looking for a friend in these parts, you are in a sad and sorry way.
The trouble about saying such things to Mama is that she’ll make you regret it. “You have a nice cousin in Raleigh your age you could be friends with,” Mama said. “It is a sin and a shame that you two don’t know one another.”
Daddy was sitting at the table working out a knot in Old Dan’s harness. He looked up at Mama and said, “The reason they don’t know each other, Idy, is because your sister don’t want nothing to do with us, and she don’t want her children to have nothing to do with our children. That’s the sad but true truth.”
Well, that set Mama to crying and moaning and groaning about how she was an orphan girl, her mama and daddy being dead and her only sister gone off the mountain to Raleigh to be a rich doctor’s wife.
I could see that I was not helping matters by standing there, so I went out to the porch, where I do my best thinking. I sat on the steps and wondered how was I supposed to make friends with someone who I never even laid eyes on. That seemed fairly unlikely to me, especially if that person’s mama was against the idea from the get-go.
Could that be true, Cousin Caroline? Does your mama really not want us to know one another? I’ve never heard of someone not wanting to know me. I surely want to know you.
I believe this is a matter that needs to be cleared up.
Here is how I come up with the idea to write my cousin Caroline a letter. I was out feeding the chickens a few mornings later, happy to be outside, since Mama was in the kitchen, her face still full of gloom. I knowed that until we got Mama cheered back up again, life would be miserable for all of us. She’d forget to put sugar in her pound cakes and make us take baths twice a day. Why, she’d probably serve us bowls of water for Sunday dinner instead of chicken stew.
I felt so strongly that if I could just meet my cousin, we would become the best of friends, and that would make Mama happy. Maybe the thing to do was steal away on Old Dan and ride to Raleigh. The problem with that plan was Old Dan was not a good riding horse. He had ideas of his own about where to go and how fast to get there. Another problem was that I weren’t quite clear on how to get to Raleigh, which would slow down my trip considerably.
Then I thought about how maybe I could hop the train that went down the mountain to Morganton, and then catch another train to Raleigh. Then, when I got to Raleigh, I could buy a map and find my way to Cousin Caroline’s house. But what if she weren’t home? And what if I got caught riding the rails like a tramp? Didn’t a person go to jail for that? Did they put twelve-year-old girls in jail? I reckoned they might, and then Mama would cry even more, and everybody would be more miserable than before.
And then it come to me. Why, making friends with my cousin was the easiest thing in the world! I stomped up the front steps to the house and found Mama in the kitchen.
“I am going to write Cousin Caroline a letter!” I told her. “Just give me a piece of paper and consider it done.”
That cheered Mama up tolerably well.
Pencil and paper in hand, I walked out to the porch, sat down on the top step, and commenced to writing. After my introductory remarks, I added some things I thought Cousin Caroline ought to know about me straightaways. I thought it best to mention that I have light-red hair that some call strawberry, but no freckles, and there are some that say I am cursed because of it. I don’t believe in such a thing as curses. Dreama Brown’s granny told us a tale of conjure ladies who live on the far eastern shores and wear gold hoops in their ears and put spells on folks. That sounds interesting to me, but I don’t believe in it.
After I wrote about curses, I wondered if that was the right way to fill up a letter. What did children down in Raleigh talk about and think about of a day? How did they fill the hours? Did they have chores that kept them busy all morning, the way that me and James and Lucille did? Might could be that if your daddy was a doctor, you didn’t have to do a thing in your life, just lean back on your fancy bed and eat candies that your butler handed you one by one.
What did I have to say of interest to a girl with a butler and probably a maid who buttoned the back of her dress every morning?
Well, I told myself, Lucille buttons my top back button for me, so that’s almost like having a maid. I laughed to think of what a sad and sorry maid Lucille would make, bossing everyone about and saying, “You’uns pick up your own mess, I’m off to play tea party with Ivadee!”
Lucille would not think twice about sending a letter to our cousin, no matter how many butlers and maids they might have down there in Raleigh. That thought give me courage, and suddenly I had so many things to say, I didn’t rightly know where to start.
My pencil raced down the paper as the words tumbled out. I wrote about the time Will Maycomb brought a live chicken in a flour sack for Sunday offering, and I wrote about the summer I was nine and went through a spell of sleep-walking, how I kept climbing out on the roof and Daddy ended up nailing my window shut, even though I never once fell off.
I wrote about how James got a fishhook caught in his hand this past May and made me pull it out because the sight of his own blood causes him to faint straight to the ground. I wrote about our old dog, Bob, who run away when I was four and who I have never once forgotten.
I had about a hundred stories at the tips of my fingers, and I decided to write down every last one and let Cousin Caroline pick out her favorites. I sat there on the steps until supper, telling one tale after another, sure that once she read my letter, my cousin would certainly want to be friends with a girl such as myself.
I hope you will write me back, Cousin Caroline, and tell me such things as the color of your hair and when your birthday is and whether or not you like to read as much as James does. I don’t care for reading myself, as I get squirrelly sitting all alone. But I like it when Mama reads to us of an evening from the books of Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott, which a missionary lady give to her when she was but a girl over on Cub Creek Mountain, and your mama was also a girl sitting by her side.
Signed,
Your Cousin,
Arie Mae Sparks
Excerpted from Anybody Shining by Frances O'Roark Dowell
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Can one mistake destroy the chance of a lifetime? A girl discovers there are many ways of being true in this magnificent ode to handwritten letters and the shining power of friendship from the author of Dovey Coe, set in the Appalachian mountains of 1920s North Carolina.
One true friend. Someone shining. That’s all twelve-year-old Arie Mae wants. But shining true friends are hard to come by deep in the mountains of western North Carolina, so she sets her sights on a cousin unseen, someone who lives all the way away in the big city of Baltimore, Maryland. Three unanswered letters later, Arie Mae learns that a group of kids from Baltimore are coming to spend a summer on the mountain.
Arie Mae loves her smudge of a town—she knows there’s nothing finer than Pa’s fiddling and Mama’s apple cake, but she also knows Big City folk might feel differently. How else to explain the song catcher ladies who have descended upon the village in search of “traditional tunes” and their intention to help “save” the townspeople? But when the group from Baltimore arrives, it seems there just might be a gem among them, one shining boy who doesn’t seem to notice Arie Mae wears the same dress every day and prefers to go barefoot. So what if he has a bit of a limp and a rumored heart problem—he also is keen about everything Arie Mae is keen about, and has all the makings of a true friend.
And so what if the boy’s mother warns him not to exert himself? He and Arie Mae have adventures to go on! In between writing letters to her cousin, Arie Mae leads her one shining friend on ghost hunts and bear chases. But it turns out those warnings were for a reason…