42 Miles Hardcover - 2008

Details

• Title 42 Miles
• Author Tracie Vaughn Zimmer
• Binding Hardcover
• Pages 80
• Volumes 1
• Language ENG
• Publisher Clarion Books
• Date April 21, 2008
• Illustrated Yes
• ISBN 9780618618675 / 0618618678
• Weight 1.42 lbs (0.64 kg)
• Dimensions 9 x 6 x 0.5 in (22.86 x 15.24 x 1.27 cm)
• Ages 10 to 12 years
• Grade levels 5 - 7
• Library of Congress subjects Schools, Novels in verse
• Library of Congress Catalog Number 2007031032
• Dewey Decimal Code FIC

Changes Until this year my parents lived four blocks apart in Cincinnati

Until this year I went to Liberty Elementary

Until this year I was average height had clear skin and didn't need glasses to see the blackboard

Everything was easier until this year

Bargains I looked just like Mom— brown eyes straight black hair.
Even my dimples match hers.
But I'm long and lean like Dad, the fifth generation Courtney kid to weave around the apple orchard on this rolling Ohio farm.

The story goes that Mom and Dad couldn't agree on a name (and a lot else, I guess) since they divorced when I was in diapers).

So I got half of Dad's name: Joseph and part of Mom's too: Eleanor.
But no one calls me by my real name: JoEllen.

Mom (and my city friends) call me Ellen, and to Dad (and his family) I've always been Joey.

Now my days— divided between them— are as different as my names.

Best Friends Tamika dreams of living in Milan, designing the latest fashions or modeling them in the pages of Vogue.
She likes the four styles of dance her mom insists she learn, and she holds herself so elegantly, as if a spotlight follows her every move.
Only Annie and I see her silly side: the impersonations she does of our teachers and parents and the way she snorts when she's cracking up

Annie's afraid of everything Lyme disease the speed of the bus the additives in cafeteria food.
She wears her worry in chewed fingernails and eyes that flit around searching out danger.
But she can take down a two-hundred pound man in judo class and wants to open her own dojo someday.

Friday Nights Mom hovers in the doorway as I stuff my backpack with homework and music.
Don't need clothes; there are plenty of worn ones tucked in the painted dresser under the attic eaves at Dad's house.

No sleeping over with Annie and Tamika.
("Try to have fun in Hicktown," they say No long Saturday afternoons spent planning outfits comparing quizzes in teen magazines painting each other's nails the same shade of green.

On the drive to the farm quiet falls like the darkness the closer we get to Dad.

Soon I'll climb out of Mom's crumbless black sedan, and she'll call from the cracked-open window "See you Sunday, Ellen."

I'll walk in the house without knocking and Dad will be standing over the sink, eating one of his odd concoctions— meatball tacos or eggplant pizza.
"I tried to wait for ya, Joey," he'll say between bites.
Then he'll hand me a plate, and my other life will begin.

Hayden My cousin Hayden lives with his parents, my Uncle Tilman and Aunt Shirley, and two collies, Rebel and Kate, on the other side of the apple orchard in a double-wide trailer.

Hayden and I spend weekends exploring the woods trail riding on Old Bess and Brownie or catching sunfish with worms from the garden.
(Can't do this in the city," he says.

Sometimes, as we head down to the pond in the last few minutes of slanting light.
Hayden grabs Papa's old five-string or pluck a harmonica from his pocket to harmonize with the tunes of twilight.
The lightning bugs begin to waltz in the darkening woods, and we stay until the stars slice holes in the night.

"Caught between her divorced parents' rural and city worlds, JoEllen approaches her 13th birthday with a growing definition and assurance of her personal identity. Half of her name is from her father, Joseph, who calls her Joey; the other half is from her mother, Eleanor, who calls her Ellen. "Now my days-/divided between them-/are as different as my names." The girl's life, however, at each end of the 42 miles that separate her parents, is rich and complicated, and the author subtly develops JoEllen's awareness: "The apple trees/share secrets./The ducks endlessly discuss/the quality of rain" ("Farm Nights"). "An ambulance wailing/cars cussing/cats calling/dogs delivering the news" ("Cincinnati Nights"). The poems meld together into a smooth story that ends with this invitation: "My favorite poems/hold a wooden spoon of words/and whisper:/Taste" ("The Poems I Like Best"). Mixed-media collage illustrations complement the subject of each poem and reinforce the complicated and changing moods of the story. Young people will appreciate this easy-to-read, empowering story."--School Library Journal
 
"Living separate lives to please her divorced parents, a young girl struggles to define herself. JoEllen's mother lives in a city apartment while her father lives 42 miles away in a farmhouse. JoEllen (named for both parents) admits "my days . . . are as different as my names." She spends schooldays with Mom, who calls her "Ellen," and weekends with Dad, who calls her "Joey." JoEllen and Mom love takeout. JoEllen and Dad invent their own recipes. In the city, JoEllen plays the sax, watches old movies, wears vintage clothing and works at a secondhand shop with her best friends. At the farm, she trail rides with her cousin, listens to bluegrass, wears work boots and slops out the stable. Split "like an apple's pale heart / on either side of the blade," JoEllen decides her two lives need to meet-just in time for her 13th birthday. Embellished with Clayton's scrapbook-like black-and-white illustrations, the free-verse text traces the hopes and fears of a thoughtful teen who optimistically merges the best of her two lives into an even better "new me."--Kirkus Reviews
 
"The forty-two miles that separate JoEllen's mother's house from her father's house also divide JoEllen into a city girl named Ellen, with friends Annie and Tamika, and a country girl named Joey, who hangs out in the orchard with her cousin Hayden.  In each place, she has bits of herself that she loves and bits that she could do without, but what she is mostly tired of is trying to maintain the split to make each parent happy and comfortable.  An assignment to write an autobiography, the finding of a memory box that proved her parents really were together and happy once, an encounter with a bully, and her thirteenth birthday converge to force a new JoEllen to surface out of her two halves.  JoEllen's empowerment seems so sudden an all-inclusive as to require a full orchestral soundtrack, but it's definitely the kind of change puberty inspires in some girls, and many readers will thus empathize with her assertion of a unified but still multifaceted self.  The real star here, however, is the form: JoEllen's split identity and her transformation emerge in image-rich, thoughtful, and often arresting poems that convey the separate lives she leads and the pain that causes, and in collage art that aptly portrays her patched-together sense of who she is.  JoEllen's poetry paints a moving, triumphant portrait of the vicissitudes of contemporary coming of age."--Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books