When Haven Kimmel was born in 1965 in Mooreland, Indiana, it 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.To three-year-old Zippy, it made perfect sense to strike a bargain with her father to keep her baby bottle--never mind that when she did, it was the first time she'd ever spoken. In her nonplussed family, Zippy has the perfect supporting cast: her beautiful yet dour brother, Danny, a seeker of the true faith; her sweetly sensible sister, Lindy, who wins the local beauty pageant; her mother, Delonda, who dispenses wisdom from the corner of the couch; and her father, Bob Jarvis, who never met a bet he didn't like.
Whether describing a serious case of chicken love, another episode with the evil Edythe across the street, or the night Zippy's dad borrowed thirty-six coon dogs and a raccoon to prove to the complaining neighbors just how quiet his two dogs were, Kimmel treats readers to a heroine who is wonderfully sweet and shy as she navigates the quirky adult world surrounding Zippy.
282 pages (March 2001)
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Title Read-alikes: The Mighty Queens of Freeville by Amy Dickinson; Born a Crime by Trevor Noah; Lake of the Ozarks by William Geist; If You Lived Here, You'd be Home by Now by Christopher Ingraham; Under Magnolia by Frances Mayes; The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls; Tales from a Free-range Childhood by Donald Davis; My Animals and Other Family by Clare Balding; The Undertaker's Daughter by Katherine Mayfield; Riverine by Anela Palm; Hands of My Father by Myron Uhlberg; The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio by Terry Ryan; fathermothergod by Lucia Greenhouse; and As the Poppies Bloomed by Maral Boyadjian.
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