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100 Best Books for Reading and Sharing 1995 (NY Public Library)
YALSA Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults, USA, 2001
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"Tightly written. . .tender and irreverent."
--Kirkus Reviews, pointer review
This is the summer journal of thirteen-year-old Mary Lou Finney,
whose 'absolutely normal chaos' includes life with her three brothers, her sister,and her parents, along with her sometimes best-friend Beth Ann, and Alex Cheevey. When Mary Lou's country cousin, Carl Ray, comes to town, he not only adds to the chaos, but he also brings along his own mystery.
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Mary Lou gives her address in this book as '4059 Buxton Road'--and that was my real address. There's a photo of my house on the photo page of this web site, and if you look closely, you can see the address.
Read more...
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I'd been living overseas (England and Switzerland) for about ten years, and I was very much missing my family back in the States. I thought I'd write a story about normal family chaos, and that's how this began, with me trying to remember what it was like growing up in my family. Writing the story was a way for me to feel as if my family were with me, right there in our little cottage in England.
My family is a lot like the Finney family--noisy, wacky. The brothers in Absolutely Normal Chaos share my own brothers' names (Dennis, Doug and Tom), but the characters are fictional. And my older sister, Sandy, is definitely not like Mary Lou's older sister (my own sister is much nicer and far more intelligent.) We did have a cousin who came to live with us when I was Mary Lou's age, and he was quite like the character Carl Ray is, but the things that happen to Carl Ray in this book did not happen to my real cousin.
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