Moonpie and Ivy

by Barbara O'Connor

Overview

A girl abandoned by her mother discovers the feeling of family

Pearl's mother, Ruby, just up and left her with Aunt Ivy, who's a complete stranger to Pearl. "Your mama's done gone off the deep end," Ivy says, and Pearl wonders if she'll ever come back - Ruby has always been wild and irresponsible. So Pearl is stuck with Aunt Ivy, and Moonpie, the neighbor boy whose mother doesn't want him, either, and John Dee, Aunt Ivy's Beau. But these three people seem to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, in a way that Pearl can't comprehend, and she feels left out. As she starts to understand what connects them, and how much she wants to be a part of it, Ruby appears.

With a vividly depicted setting, emotional truth, and a distinctly Southern voice, Barbara O'Connor shows how Pearl develops a whole new notion of what she wants, and what she deserves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466813021
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/02/2004
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	144 KB
Age Range:	10 - 14 Years

About the Author

Barbara O'Connor has written several popular novels for young readers, including Me and Rupert Goody, an ALA Notable Book, and Fame and Glory in Freedom, Georgia. She was born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina, and currently lives in Duxbury, Massachusetts.

Barbara O’Connor was born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina, and currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina. She has written many beloved and award-winning books for children, including Dream, Halfway to Harmony, How to Steal a Dog, and the #1 New York Times bestseller Wish.

Editorial Reviews

Why do some kids have loving families and others do not? That unanswerable question is at the heart of this touching story about a girl named Pearl, whose mother drops her off unannounced to stay with the girl's aunt Ivy. Ivy is everything Pearl's mother Ruby is not: steady, understanding and loving. But both Pearl and Ivy know that Ruby will be back to take her daughter away again. Meanwhile Pearl watches as her new friend Moonpie, a boy with troubles of his own, gets taken permanently under Ivy's wing. Skillfully drawn, sympathetic characters face everyday problems with courage in this fine novel.
—Kathleen Odean

(Excerpted Review)

A Child Magazine Best Book of 2001 Pick

Stranded at her Aunt Ivy's in backwoods Georgia by her feckless mother, Pearl slowly begins to blossom. She befriends a neighbor boy and envisions a life in the framework of a loving family. In the end, things don't turn out quite the way Pearl had imagined, but she carries away something new with her -- hope.

Child Magazine

The twin challenges of loving and being loved form the theme of another Southern gem from the author of Me and Rupert Goody (1999). Twelve-year-old Pearl has spent her life moving from one place to another with her feckless mother, Ruby, who seems more interested in her boyfriend-of-the-moment than her daughter. At the novel's opening, Pearl finds herself uprooted once more, but with one major exception: this time, Ruby has left her with her aunt, Ivy, and then disappeared completely. Understandably resentful and unaccustomed to affection wholeheartedly offered, Pearl keeps Ivy at arm's length, and only grudgingly consents to a sort of friendship with Moonpie, the strange boy who lives up the hill with his dying grandmother. Pearl's emotional state is charted in the postcards she writes, but cannot send, to her mother: "Dear Mama, I hate you. Love, Pearl" is succeeded by "Dear Mama, Please come back-but if you can't come right away, that's okay. Love, Pearl." As she begins to relax into her new life, she realizes that she likes stability, but Ivy's love for Moonpie, who is a sort of surrogate son, threatens her fragile security. O'Connor keeps the beautifully simple, colloquial third-person narration filtered tightly through Pearl, so the reader encounters her emotions and her confusion directly. The squalor of poverty is rendered without sentimentality, but the honesty and universality of the characters' emotions inform the real story. The novel's shrewd observations of the tangles of human relationships allow no easy happy endings: Ruby's reappearance at the end interrupts Pearl's slow realization that she can love and, more importantly, is worth loving. But shehaslearned to hope, and that is no small thing for her-and the reader-to carry away. (Fiction. 10-14)

Kirkus Reviews