MY LOUISIANA SKY

In her first YA novel, Holt gives a fresh theme sensitive and deliberate treatment: The bright child of “slow” parents comes to terms with her family’s place in the community. Tiger Ann Parker is smart; she’s gotten straight A’s and won the spelling bee five years in a row. People in her rural 1950s Louisiana community can’t figure out where she got her brains, because everyone knows that her parents, are mentally challenged. Her mother has the capabilities of a six-year-old, while her father, a good steady worker at the nursery down the road, can’t manage writing or simple math. Tiger loves her parents, but as she enters middle school she becomes increasingly aware that she’s socially ostracized by her classmates; her affection for her family becomes mixed with shame and anger at their differences. When Tiger’s loving grandmother, who has always run the household, has a fatal heart attack, Tiger is invited to live with her glamorous Aunt Doreen in Baton Rouge. Tempted to move away and reinvent herself, Tiger ultimately comes to appreciate her parents’ strengths and her own as well. Tiger, with her warring feelings, is a believable and likable narrator, and while the offerings of big-city living are too patly rejected, a well-developed setting and fully-realized characters make this an unusually strong coming-of-age story. (Fiction. 10-14)