The Girl in the Well Is Me

December 14, 2015
Rivers (Finding Ruby Starling) adheres to the advice that fiction writers “give their characters trouble” in this psychological horror story. Over a day and night trapped in a well, Kammie Summers, 11, recounts a horrific year. After her father’s incarceration for a heinous crime, a beloved relative dies of cancer, and a bus kills the family dog outside their New Jersey home (which the bank is repossessing). The Summers relocate to “Nowheresville,” Texas, exchanging a life of plasma-screen TVs and horseback-riding lessons for a trailer where Kammie shares a bedroom with a brother who doesn’t like her anymore. Asthmatic Kammie doles out the details of her downward mobility while the mean girls who tricked her into falling into the well look down and laugh. Rivers writes intense scenes of hallucinatory prose as the sky darkens, and oxygen deprivation causes Kammie to imagine dead goats beneath her feet, spiders attacking her legs, and the company of a French-speaking coyote. The stream-of-consciousness narration recalls Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” but claustrophobics will probably want to read something else. Ages 10–13. Agent: Jennifer Laughran, Andrea Brown Literary Agency.

January 1, 2016

Gr 4-6-Kammie Summers is wedged partway down a well shaft, unable to move her arms and possibly running low on oxygen. In a funny, surreal, occasionally heartbreaking stream-of-consciousness narrative, Kammie ponders the clique of girls whose mean-spirited initiation ritual caused her fall down the well and who don't feel as much urgency about her rescue as Kammie (and readers) might hope. She contemplates her mother, frazzled from working two jobs; her father, in prison for embezzling money from a children's charity; and the fallout from her dad's terrible decisions, including their move to the backwater town where her attempts to make friends led to this catastrophe. Kammie's spiky but sympathetic narration yields a compulsively readable story, traveling swiftly from friendship woes to sibling conflict to conversations with the silver Francophone coyote she hallucinates as the oxygen situation deteriorates. Rivers provides Kammie-along with the coyote and some unfriendly zombie goats-authentic feelings of guilt, anger, loneliness, and self-pity about her circumstances in and out of the immediate danger of the well. Though the book confronts both the specter of death and the reality of parental betrayal, Rivers has a middle grade audience in mind; the tangential meandering keeps the pacing snappy, and Kammie emerges from the well reasonably intact. The narrative falters at the very end as uplifting resolutions come too easily, but middle grade readers likely won't mind the rosy lens. VERDICT An unusual story with uncommonly truthful emotions.-Robbin E. Friedman, Chappaqua Library, NY

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 15, 2015
Kammie's fallen down an abandoned well, beyond the reach of the three mean, popular girls who got her into this life-threatening mess. Her perilous situation is really the culmination of a series of calamities that she gradually reveals in her unforgettable stream-of-consciousness monologue. First, her father was convicted of embezzling money from his employer, a charitable organization that provided wish fulfillment for critically ill children. She, her struggling mother, and her angry older brother moved from their foreclosed New Jersey home to a Texas trailer to be near her father's prison. Her dog was hit by a bus. Her grandmother died. The misfortunes have piled one on top of another. Striving to find a new self and a few friends, Kammie let herself be victimized by the nearly interchangeable Kandy, Mandy, and Sandy, who have--perhaps intentionally--set her up for the fall into the well and then abandoned her there. With so many horrors crowding into her 11 years, Kammie's tale should be a tragedy. Instead, it's a brilliantly revealed, sometimes even funny, exploration of courage, the will to live, and the importance of being true to oneself. The catastrophe draws readers in, and the universality of spunky Kammie's life-affirming journey will engage a wide audience. Moving, suspenseful, and impossible to put down. (Fiction. 10-16)

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February 15, 2016
Grades 5-7 Not much is going right for Kammie. Before she moved to what she refers to as Nowheresville, Texas, her father was convicted of embezzlement, and she was ostracized at school. Now poor and disheartened, she decides to remake herself and seeks out a cadre of her new school's queen bees. That's how she wound up with her hair chopped into short hunks and stuck in an old well. With no guarantee the girls who lured her to the spot will go for help, Kammie reflects on the ways things went wrong and dreams about what she would like life to ideally be. As night falls and depleting oxygen leads her to loop through her feelings, the abandoned girl is finally discovered. Readers will be eager to find out if she is rescued at last, and if she manages her life better in the incident's aftermath. A different sort of bullying book, with the spotlight never leaving the victim, it should strike a chord with its tween audience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2016
Eleven-year-old Kammie tells most of this story from inside the well into which she's fallen after a (fake) initiation into a popular-girls' clique. For much of the brief text, readers are right there with Kammie, learning vivid details of her predicament. Kammie's voice--often funny, but with enough truths about her problems in and out of the well that we take her seriously--is compelling.

(Copyright 2016 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

May 1, 2016
Eleven-year-old narrator Kammie Summers tells most of this story from inside a well. New in town and eager to make friends, she has agreed to what turns out to be a fake initiation into popular-girls Mandy, Kandy, and Sandy's clique, resulting in a catastrophic fall. For much of the brief text, readers are right there with Kammie in that well, learning vivid details of her predicament -- sliding down farther makes the skin rub off her knees and elbows; her lungs feel "gluey." But her thoughts meander constantly, slowly revealing bits of how exactly she got there even as she reveals a mordant but alleviating sense of humor: "This, as my grandma would say if she wasn't dead, is a fine kettle of fish." At first, her situation just seems to be a prank gone wrong -- very wrong, but in a fixable way. But it soon becomes clear that Kammie's in real danger: when help finally arrives, she can't grab the rope because her arms are stuck, and she needs a tube lowered to provide her with oxygen. As the situation becomes increasingly dire and the progression of Kammie's thoughts becomes less logical, she reveals aspects of her backstory that are more concerning; she was emotionally distressed long before she misguidedly approached the mean girls. Kammie's voice -- often funny, but with enough truths about her problems in and out of the well that we take her seriously -- is compelling enough to propel readers through a novel that takes place almost entirely in one, claustrophobic spot. shoshana flax

(Copyright 2016 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)