Firefly Cloak

I ended up enjoying this a lot more than I thought I would. Sheila abandons her 2 children in a campground with nothing but a trashbag full of clothes and her mother's phone number, written in black magic marker on her son's back.

Seven years later, Tessa Lee finds out that her mother has been living just 2 hours away. Her visit to her mother shakes up everybody's life.

Sheila's mother is set up as the saintly, long-suffering grandmother, who devotes herself to the children her daughter has dumped. Then she gets knocked off her pedestal - we find out she's a racist, who drove her daughter away because she couldn't tolerate her dating a black man.

As for Sheila, we find out that she wasn't as bad as we thought. She recognized that she show more couldn't take care of her children and left them with someone who could. She made bad choices, but she tried to protect her kids. By the end, you believe that she might just be able to pull her life together. show less

Tessa Lee and her little brother Travis are abandoned by their mother and her current boyfriend in a campground near the home of grandparents they've never met. Mom Sheila writes her parents' phone number in permanent marker on little Travis' naked back and leaves the firefly housecoat under which the children were sleeping when she and her boyfriend light out. The story then jumps about eight years to when Tessa Lee is 16 and she decides she must go to the touristy boardwalk a few hours away where her mother was last seen working so that she can tell her the terrible thing that happened to Travis. As Tessa Lee makes this journey, and is confronted with a truth she never wanted to face, much of the backstory also becomes clear. As you'd show more expect, Tessa Lee loses some of her innocence, although she is extraordinarily lucky on her journey as well but the largest growth in a character somes to her grandmother, who has tried very hard to recognize the ways in which she alienated her own daughter, Tessa's mother Sheila, and to change that in her treatment of Tessa Lee. The ending has a few too many coincidences but Rice resists the urge to unveil them all to the characters, even if the reader sees them, which is a bit of a help. There are several extended scenes that are completely gratuitous and offered nothing to the story, despite the desperate attempts at connecting them through the reader's guide questions. And the ultimate end to the book was too easy, unrealistic, and clearly incomplete.

This was a book chosen for my bookclub based on one member's strength of feeling for a previous book of Reynolds' and she spent most of the meeting apologizing as not one person particularly enjoyed this one. It was hard to sympathize with the characters, even as they changed, they stayed strangely flat. There were instances of lovely writing but even that couldn't save the book from mediocrity, unfortunate since everyone had wanted to enjoy it so very much. An interesting premise, it fell short of its promise. show less

Tessa Lee is 8 years old and her brother Travis is 3 and still in diapers when their mother meets another man in a string of many men and abandons her children at a campground with their grandparents' phone number written in Magic Marker on the baby's back. This is really Tessa Lee's coming-of-age story and a mesmerizing story it is. Lots of sadness but with an ending that gives the reader hope that the characters they have come to care so much about will survive and heal.

What sets this novel apart from what Sheri Reynolds has written is the different P.O.V. Third person omniscient can be a bother to the eye if you're a reader and not a writer. I really loved the book. The movement was fairly fluid. In the omniscient P.O.V., you have the flexibility to move in time and through characters' minds. Ms. Reynolds displays a masterful grip on hinges, moving between time and person. I only wanted to know how Travis and the grandfather died sooner, but that's a reader's selfish inclination. Holding out on that information really created a wonderful display of emotion in the end!

A gritty look at familial bonds, those that are helpful and harmful. Makes you go to some dark places. But there are mermaid hookers in storefront windows, and that's worth reading about. Who's with me?

I enjoyed Sheri Reynolds character development and beautiful use of language in this coming of age, hard knock life story. I listened to the audio version and also give a big thumbs up to the reader. Her southern accent and altering of tone and pitch per character made it very enjoyable.

This book, by the author of one of my all-time favorites, The Rapture of Canaan, once again has an adolescent (16-year-old) girl at the center of the story. At the beginning of the book she, as a nine-year-old, and her younger brother are abandoned by her mother, who's addicted to drugs, alcohol & sex. The girl & her brother are raised in a trailer court by their retired grandparents, who are loving & devout but overly protective. There are brilliant passages of the sort that permeated The Rapture of Canaan, but for the most part it doesn't rise much above the standard teenager overcoming a dysfunctional family so beloved by Oprah Winfrey.