DiCamillo uses her light touch and boundless humor to deliver the difficult news that adults are fallible and that children must learn to develop an unwavering sense of self-reliance and self-acceptance. Summoning the wit of Flannery O’Connor and the sweet melancholy of John Prine, she elegantly connects her characters’ wild actions to their roiling emotions. She writes with compassion and grace about both childhood traumas and adult transgressions ... There is something wonderfully off-balance about DiCamillo’s storytelling. It allows her characters to sparkle and soar. DiCamillo has called this novel, based partly on her own fatherless Florida childhood, 'the absolutely true story of my heart.' What a beautiful and generous heart it is.
The magic resides in DiCamillo’s trademark ability to find the odd beauty and amazing possibilities in the mundane...The young damsels in distress test their courage and rescue one another; and the book closes not with a conventional 'happily ever after' but with a shared vision of the world as vast and yet intimately connected.
DiCamillo’s prose contains magical lines—'There was something scary about watching an adult sleep. It was as if no one at all were in charge of the world'—which grow even more poignant when you realize the sleeping adult is a mean drunk, and that the young girls are dealing with more than they even know. She also has a profound understanding of the way children collect bits of tossed-off wisdom from adults and turn them into a life manual. It’s a thrill to watch Raymie go through this process, uncovering truths and forming new questions along the way.
In another novel, all this could get oppressively sappy. But DiCamillo — who also grew up in central Florida and is herself a veteran of baton-twirling lessons — wryly captures the adventure and confusion of childhood with a gut-wrenching lack of sentimentality and a razor-sharp wit...[I]n spare, fantastically unfussy prose, the two-time Newbery Award winner creates a profoundly rich world where everyone, heroes and minor characters alike, is at once achingly human and brilliantly bizarre. There are no easy answers here — just a story of loss and friendship steeped in bittersweet hope.
Kate DiCamillo has made a career of inventing young characters whose soulfulness rivals that of the adults in their lives, from her iconic first novel for young readers, Because of Winn-Dixie (2000), to the Newbery-winning Flora & Ulysses (2013). Raymie Nightingale too reminds adults about the profound depth of childhood feelings.
If John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men had been written for children, it might have looked something like Kate DiCamillo’s new novel, ...In DiCamillo’s tale, the best-laid plans actually go awry for the better. And though the outcome may not be exactly what the characters hoped for, it’s still surprisingly satisfying. ??In a lovely twist, the unpredictability that initially threatened Raymie’s dearest hopes ends up being a strengthening agent, allowing her to discover reserves of fortitude she didn’t know she had. Having faced and overcome disappointment, she gains wisdom. And rather than give up on her dreams, she builds on what she’s learned – and makes new ones.
