The Silver Star

by Jeannette Walls
Hennepin County Library audiobook 7 discs
read by the author
genre: realistic historical fiction

Oh my! I thought this might be a "lighter" / "easier" book than her memoir or the stories of her grandmother's life . . . not so much. Walls has an amazing gift of storytelling!

Jerry Maddox - yuk! Awful person! He creeps me out! Bank accounts - don't trust him! Good girl, Jean! Get your pay in cash. (Made me think of Financial Peace University. Grin.)

Historic background, opinion vs fact, Maddox is a slimeball! I had such a strong visceral reaction to the story that I had to stop the CD at times. I simply couldn't keep listening!

"There was only one thing to do. I had to kill Jerry Maddox." Uh-oh . . . I know how you feel, but this isn't a great plan.

The trial was awful! Even worse than I was expecting!

Love love love Miss Jarvis providing a safe haven in her classroom for all the "misfits" . . . gathering up the outcasts. She's my kind of teacher!

Loved the emu roundup!

So intense! Maddox / justice / emus home / heard a bear . . .

From Goodreads:
It is 1970 in a small town in California. “Bean” Holladay is twelve and her sister, Liz, is fifteen when their artistic mother, Charlotte, takes off to find herself, leaving her girls enough money to last a month or two. When Bean returns from school one day and sees a police car outside the house, she and Liz decide to take the bus to Virginia, where their widowed Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that’s been in Charlotte’s family for generations.

An impetuous optimist, Bean soon discovers who her father was, and hears stories about why their mother left Virginia in the first place. Money is tight, and the sisters start babysitting and doing office work for Jerry Maddox, foreman of the mill in town, who bullies his workers, his tenants, his children, and his wife. Liz is whip-smart--an inventor of word games, reader of Edgar Allan Poe, nonconformist, but when school starts in the fall, it’s Bean who easily adjusts, and Liz who becomes increasingly withdrawn. And then something happens to Liz in the car with Maddox.