Reviews for The Curse of Addy McMahon by Katie Davis
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The
novel opens with a comics-style "Autobiogra-strip." Recurring at
intervals throughout the book, this visual diary dramatizes
sixth-grader Addy's view of her life. Addy subscribes to the notion
that she is shadowed by an ancestral curse. Still aching from her
father's death years before, she is upset when her mother's boyfriend
movies into their guest room "temporarily." Worse, she accidentally
humiliates her best friend in a very public manner and suffers for it.
Addy's way back from this humbling experience is even tougher than
seeing her worst enemy walk into the lingerie shop as her mother buys
her a training bra.
Davis
re-creates all the pain, poignancy, and occasional satisfaction of
sixth-grade life in this vivid first-person narrative. Readers who cut
their chapter-book teeth a year or two ago on Marissa Moss' Amelia
series will love the mix of text and cartoon strips, heartache and
humor, as well as the more fully developed narrative here. And they'll
long for just as many sequels.
Kirkus Reviews
Addy
believes her Grandmother when she claims the "family curse" has been
lurking for several generations. How else can she explain losing her
father to cancer, having to get along with her mom's new "houseguest,"
Jonathan, losing her best friend to an e-mail mistake and being singled
out as the most hated girl in the sixth grade? Addy wants to be a
published writer and is already on her way with the school's monthly
newspaper. Davis melds typical tween social dilemmas with the
consequences of terminal illness and a child's privately painful grief.
Disturbed by her mother's impending second marriage, Addy reflects on
life through her graphic "autobiogra-strip" that is woven through the
novel, telling her story in a sardonic and somewhat fatalistic voice.
Yet she remains determined to mend a broken friendship and learns to
accept life's challenges for what they are-not curses, but realities
she can work through on her way to new successes. A well-crafted view
of a child's inner struggles and emotional growth.
Washington Post
Book of the Week
When
the first page of a book reads "Private Diary, so . . . Keep Out!!!,"
what should you do? Keep reading, of course! How else will you find out
if Addy McMahon ever manages to break the curse?
The
way 12-year-old Addy tells it -- partly through graphic comics and IM
chats -- the curse began when her great-grandfather chopped down a tree
that was really a fairy lair. Now the curse has landed squarely on Addy.
Her
best efforts to lift it, by leaving plates of treats out in her room so
long that they grow layers of fuzzy mold, are strangely unsuccessful.
She's terrible at math. Her life is full of things that are just plain
gross, like her mom's new boyfriend and the idea of eating snails. A
new girl at school has replaced her as the star soccer player. And when
she accidentally sends the wrong e-mail to her best friend, it looks
like that friendship is totally over.
What's
really hard, though, is that her father died of cancer and now her mom
could be falling in love again. Addy deals with her emotions by writing
graphic stories, but will she ever manage to deal with her problems in
real life?
Author
Katie Davis might have felt cursed herself because, she confesses in a
graphic comic (of course!), it took her eight years to write this book.
But the result is a winning tale of middle-school awkwardness and
laugh-out-loud funniness that proves that anyone has the power to turn
a curse into good luck.
