Rear-View Mirrors - Hardcover

Paul Fleischman

3.6

15 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060218665 ISBN 13: 9780060218669

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1986

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Olivia comes to a new understanding of and discovers a growing bond with her father, from whom she has not seen or heard since her parents' divorce years before, during a summer vacation in New Hampshire

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About the Author:

PAUL FLEISCHMAN grew up in Santa Monica, California, in a house with a printing press, a grand piano, a shortwave radio, and his father -- children's author Sid Fleischman. Playing recorder in early music consorts led to his books of verbal duets: I Am Phoenix, Joyful Noise (winner of the 1989 Newbery Medal, and Big Talk. His novels built from monologues include Bull Run, a sixteen-character account of the Civil War's first battle, and Seedfolks, the chronicle of the first year of a Cleveland community garden. His interest in theater inspired his young adult novels Mind's Eye, Seek, and Breakout, all of which revolve around the spoken word. His historical fiction includes Saturnalia and The Borning Room. He's written nonfiction and picture books as well, including Time Train, Weslandia, and Sidewalk Circus. Alongside the Newbery Medal, he's won a Newbery Honor Book, the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, the PEN West Literary Award, the California Young Reader Medal, and most recently was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Award. He makes his home in the village of Aromas, California.

From School Library Journal:

Grade 8 Up As the title suggests, Rear-View Mirrors is a remembrance of things not long past. More prose elegy than novel, this thematically rich and well-written book recounts 17-year-old Olivia Tate's memories of her first encounter, the previous summer, with the father she has never known, her parents having been divorced when she was 8 months old. The first-person narrative cuts back and forth between two journeys: the one, in the present, is a bicycle ride which, as a rite of passage, completes the other, which was a journey to both knowledge of her father and herself begun the summer before. Each mile traveled, each day remembered, uncovers a new layer of personal self-discovery much as each stroke of an archaeologist's shovel uncovers a new layer of the past. And, so, it is not insignificant that Olivia decides, at the first summer's end, that archaeology will be her life's work. The skill with which Fleischman creates the characters of Olivia and her writer father Hannibal and with which he evokes the rural New Hampshire setting are occasions for joy and celebration and can only be matched by the extraordinary felicity of his prose style. Michael Cart, Beverly Hills Public Library
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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