Papas and Nellie Press
November 2005
$15.00 US
216p pb
ISBN: 0-9719925-6-8
The Criminal Life Of Effie O.: an entertainment
Sam Savage
illustrations by Virginia Beverley
product description...
Set
in the conflicted eighties the story recounts the intertwined journeys
of
self-discovery of preteen Effie O’Reilly and her lonely, loving mother
Janet.
A single mom and former flower child, Janet has fought her way up from
the
precarious countercultural seventies to an executive career and a house
in an
upscale gated subdivision bland enough to shield her child from any
whiff of
that risky past. But subversive artistic Effie wants something more.
And so one
day she rebels, throwing her school into hilarious chaos, and runs away
for a
long day in the city, where she gets a taste of life on the edge. The
tumult,
the street people, the teeming eventfulness of inner-city life, all
call to her
with news of something other.
What that is and how Effie
and Janet each
in her own way finds it in the course of an eventful and uproarious
year is the
story told by this unusual novel.
And it tells it at breakneck speed in an energetic loose-jointed rhyming verse that veers easily from Shel Silverstein-like jingles to melancholic passages of great poetic beauty. The book can be read – preferably aloud – in a couple of hours. Broadly comical and satiric, unabashedly sentimental, and at the same time savvy and gritty, it is one to be read again and again.
If you have read this verse novel and would like to share your opinion of it with other readers please send your review or comments to YARR-A