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A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland Indiana | 
 enlarge | Author: Haven Kimmel
Publisher: Broadway
Category: EBooks
List Price: $9.95
Buy New: $7.96
You Save: $1.99 (20%)
Rating:  198 reviews
Sales Rank: 3371
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Dewey Decimal Number: 977.264
ASIN: B000FC1I9U
Publication Date: June 18, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
When Haven Kimmel was born in 1965, Mooreland, Indiana, was a sleepy little hamlet of three hundred people. Nicknamed "Zippy" for the way she would bolt around the house, this small girl was possessed of big eyes and even bigger ears. In this witty and lovingly told memoir, Kimmel takes readers back to a time when small-town America was caught in the amber of the innocent postwar period–people helped their neighbors, went to church on Sunday, and kept barnyard animals in their backyards.
Laced with fine storytelling, sharp wit, dead-on observations, and moments of sheer joy, Haven Kimmel's straight-shooting portrait of her childhood gives us a heroine who is wonderfully sweet and sly as she navigates the quirky adult world that surrounds Zippy.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 193 more reviews...
 Most Cleverly Written September 21, 2008
How does Kimmel do it? She grips the reader into a tale (based on her very skewed childhood memory) and then she throws the reader a curve ball. Sometimes, it's the very last sentence of a memory or the last word. It is that insightful nugget of information that allows the reader to know so much more about the situation than the child-storyteller does.
I laughed out loud through so much of this book, and when I was done, I wanted more, so I picked up She Got Up Off the Couch. It's a book you will want to share.
Deserted-Island Read August 20, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
ZIPPY makes the short list of books I would take on a deserted island; it makes my heart sing. It makes me want to write.
 Animal Lovers Beware June 27, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
In the first 75 pages of this warm and fuzzy book, the following happens (and not much else): a piglet dies, a dog dies of worms, a hen and rooster are dragged off by dogs, the dogs get shot, a cat is stolen and starved in a basement, oh, and a rabbit has its ears stapled to a fence and its head chopped off. One would expect plenty of death on a farm but there's no farm in this story. Just a backyard.
 Really well written June 18, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Well written memoir. I think most people who read this book get the fact that though she was loved by her parents, her childhood was far less than perfect. I for one did not read this book and think "wow, what a refreshing a wonderful memoir of a lovely and decent childhood". It was cleverly written from a child's perspective so that we adult readers would read enough into what she was writing to understand that though her childhood was, in many ways, quite dysfunctional and disturbing at times, the author herself saw life from a different perspective. This could have easily been written as a 'woe is me' kind of memoir but it would have been far less interesting and real. I appreciate her humor and positive light. There were many times when I related entirely to what she was writing (I too grew up in a dysfunctional family in a very small town in Indiana) and many times I laughed right out loud. I really enjoyed this book.
Well Written, Yet Troubling April 17, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
I concur with much of the praise that precedes me: "Zippy" is a lyrically written, thoughtful, engaging memoir that I read with great pleasure.
And yet, in the end, it was the very pleasure of my reading experience that troubled me. A reviewer below notes, "It is refreshing every once in a while to read a story that doesn't have murder, major drama, or psychological problems." Yet the book is chock full of every one of those things, and then some: those themes are just so sugar-coated, the reader is hypnotized into overlooking them.
A short list of thematic elements touched on by the book includes: depression, alcoholism, birth defects, child-neglect, child sexual abuse, murder, teenage pregnancy, animal cruelty (in abundance), mental illness, religious fanatacism, grinding poverty, gambling addiction, and the Mi Lai Massacre, for goodness' sake!
And yet these themes are all presented in a filmy, dreamlike way that removes their sting and horror. One could argue that that is the theme of the book: the triumph of one child's powerful sense of self over adversity.
However, as I turned the final page, I began to feel that I had been tricked into approving, even admiring, the "good old days" that never were. I believe the author could have and should have demanded more of the reader to connect the dots between events as seen from the child's point of view and the more stark light of adult reality. This book makes it all too easy for the reader to condone a world in which very serious issues are treated as light afternoon reading on the front porch swing.
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