Marrying Malcolm Murgatroyd - Softcover

Mame Farrell lives in Monroe, Connecticut. Her second novel, Bradley and the Billboard, was recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Grade 4-6?Hannah, 12, has problems: her third-grade brother Ian's muscular dystrophy embarrasses her, and she must hide her friendship (since infancy) with sixth-grade classmate Malcolm Murgatroyd (also known as Murgadork), son of her parents' best friends. (In fact, their families have projected their marriage since their births). What's a popular girl to do? After Ian has a serious brush with death, she makes her choice and publicly acknowledges the importance of both boys in her life. Written in the first person, the book has some funny, touching moments. The central characters are well drawn, with Malcolm a determined free-thinker and Hannah a convincingly conflicted young woman. Her school clique is a frightening mass of shallow, judgmental adolescents with raging hormones. So far, it rings true. However, the book lacks detail to place it in time; the social texture suggests the 1950s, but the landscape lacks evidence to place it there or anywhere else. At book's conclusion, Hannah reads her autobiography aloud to her class: "My future plans include going to college, doing volunteer work for the Muscular Dystrophy Foundation, and someday, if I'm lucky, marrying someone like Malcolm Murgatroyd." Which, she says in the next sentence, "is exactly what I did." The sudden change in voice from present to past is jarring. Certainly, the experience of the child in this novel is valid, but her marriage expectations in combination with the time-warp effect imply that this is a work of historical, not contemporary, fiction. This is a first novel by a writer who shows promise.?Carolyn Noah, Central Mass. Regional Library System, Worcester, MA
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