The Girl Who Ate Chicken Feet - Hardcover

Richardson, Sandy

9780803722545: The Girl Who Ate Chicken Feet

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803722540 ISBN 13: 9780803722545

Publisher: Dial, 1998

Chronicles the adventures, experiences and mishaps of Sissy, a young pre-adolescent girl living in the South during the late 1950s, as she tries to find herself amidst her busy homelife and extended family.

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From School Library Journal:

Grade 4-8?With humor and compassion, Richardson recounts pivotal events in the life of a white girl in Midville, SC, in the early 1960s. Sissy learns lessons about honesty, kindness, and justice through her colorful experiences with a cast of entertaining characters. To cure the jealousy she feels for her new baby brother, Sissy bargains with a gypsy fortuneteller. To earn the black patent-leather, high-heeled shoes she covets, she agrees to help her grandmother raise chickens. To keep on the good side of her trouble-making cousin Delores, the girl joins in a secret church service praying for an Immaculate Conception for her aunt. To show her courage and independence, Sissy decides to make grits, walking the slippery trail to the mill to get corn ground and then struggling with the recipe. Throughout her adventures, unflappable adults such as Granny, Big Daddy, and their black cook, Elease, are prominent figures, offering wisdom and comfort. Sissy discovers that superstition and face-saving antics often hide deeper truths. Then, when her beloved, perceptive Elease finally leaves to join the civil rights movement in Alabama, Sissy realizes that change and growing up are inevitable. Although readers may not be acquainted with the story's milieu or the rumblings of racial unrest in the 1960s, they will find familiarity, humor, and insight in Sissy's early adolescent anxieties, desires, decisions, and discoveries. Lively regional dialogue, fast-paced storytelling, and vivid descriptions add charm and appeal.?Gerry Larson, Durham Magnet Center, Durham, NC
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

The many charming moments in Richardson's inaugural novel read more like a collection of southern tall tales, with 10-year-old Sissy at the center. The author's homespun mix of story lines about a goose, Gypsies, patent-leather shoes, the civil rights movement and various sketches about colorful 1960s South Carolina townsfolk, at times, has the effect of making Sissy into an observer in her own book. This is not a novel for readers who require a straightforward plot, but rather for those who wish to put up their feet and sit a spell. A few plot threads trail off or pick up so far down the line that they're frayed; for instance, the opening chapter mentions trouble "[having] to do with the colored people down in Mississippi and Alabama," but not until the very end does the family cook, Elease, suddenly leave to join the civil rights movement. Bittersweet tales join comic ones: Sissy and her friend have their fortunes told by a band of Gypsies (who threaten to take Sissy's baby brother as payment); Sissy's cousin Delores convinces her to break into the church to help her pray for a baby sister to come; and the protagonist and Big Daddy trip up some Yankees on a duck-hunting excursion. Those readers who enjoy an entertaining yarn will find plenty to satisfy them here. Ages 10-up.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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