The title is awful, but Kimmel's childhood memoir rings true. Mooreland had a population of about 300, small enough for a grade-school girl to explore every corner and have strong opinions about the town's adults. More important, however, than the mean old lady across the street and the loud old man at the drugstore were Kimmel's family (parents, older brother and sister, and various pets) and the "best friends" with whom she experienced her small world. Kimmel remembers vividly what it felt like to be a kid: the pleasure of being outdoors; the unquestioned bonds of a "best" friendship; and the oddness of many of the things adults (and teenagers) do. Even in the 1960s and 1970s (Kimmel was born in 1965), Mooreland escaped the larger society's disruptions. An empty store was a Ku Klux Klan headquarters in the 1920s, but there were no African Americans around town; a pair of hippies moved in and offered Zippy a chance to give her dad a valued present. Mary Carroll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Advance Praise for A Girl Named Zippy:
"Here is a rarity: a completely original book, narrated in the freshest, most compelling child's narrative voice since Ellen Foster. Often hysterically funny, sometimes wrenching, A Girl Named Zippy is filled with revelations. Haven Kimmel has penned a lovely poem to her heartland hometown."
--Lee Smith, author of Oral History and Family Line
"A Girl Named Zippyis sly, evocative, gentle, wry and dead-on funny. Haven Kimmel is perfect on the details and spins graceful stories that sink in and stay with you for a good long time. This is, simply put, a masterful piece of writing--imagine pouring a highball, settling into a comfortable seat, and being entertained on a summer porch by a charming old friend."
--Martin Clark, author of The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living
"The prose in this book is lovely and wise and witty and sings as beautifully as Somewhere Over the Rainbow, but it seems to be have been written by Dorothy's wild and irreverent sister, the one you never saw in the movie, the one who locked Dorothy outside when the tornado was coming, sold Toto, set fire to the scarecrow, ate the flying monkeys for lunch, and painted all the blacktop roads in Mooreland, Indiana, the colors of the rainbow, the colors of imagination and heart and laughter."
--Lawrence Naumoff, author of Rootie Kazootie and Silk Hope, NC
"Phenomenal. This is just perfectly written and right on target and she doesn't miss a beat."
--Kaye Gibbons, author of Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman
From the Inside Flap
When Haven Kimmel was born in 1965 in 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.
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.
From the Back Cover
Advance Praise for A Girl Named Zippy:
"Here is a rarity: a completely original book, narrated in the freshest, most compelling child's narrative voice since Ellen Foster. Often hysterically funny, sometimes wrenching, A Girl Named Zippy is filled with revelations. Haven Kimmel has penned a lovely poem to her heartland hometown."
--Lee Smith, author of Oral History and Family Line
"A Girl Named Zippyis sly, evocative, gentle, wry and dead-on funny. Haven Kimmel is perfect on the details and spins graceful stories that sink in and stay with you for a good long time. This is, simply put, a masterful piece of writing--imagine pouring a highball, settling into a comfortable seat, and being entertained on a summer porch by a charming old friend."
--Martin Clark, author of The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living
"The prose in this book is lovely and wise and witty and sings as beautifully as Somewhere Over the Rainbow, but it seems to be have been written by Dorothy's wild and irreverent sister, the one you never saw in the movie, the one who locked Dorothy outside when the tornado was coming, sold Toto, set fire to the scarecrow, ate the flying monkeys for lunch, and painted all the blacktop roads in Mooreland, Indiana, the colors of the rainbow, the colors of imagination and heart and laughter."
--Lawrence Naumoff, author of Rootie Kazootie and Silk Hope, NC
"Phenomenal. This is just perfectly written and right on target and she doesn't miss a beat."
--Kaye Gibbons, author of Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman
About the Author
Haven Kimmel studied English and creative writing at Ball State University and North Carolina State University and attended seminary at the Earlham School of Religion. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Baby Book
The following was recorded by my mother in my baby book, under the heading milestones:
first steps: Nine months! Precocious!
first teeth: Bottom two, at eight months. Still nursing her, but she doesn't bite, thank goodness!
first says "mommy": (blank)
first says "daddy": (blank)
first waves bye-bye: As of her first birthday, she is not much interested in waving bye-bye.
At age eighteen months, the baby book provided a space for further milestones, in which my mother wrote:
She's still very active and energetic. Her daddy calls her "Zippy," after a little chimpanzee he saw roller-skating on television. The monkey was first in one place and then zip! in another. Has twelve teeth. I'm still nursing her—she's a thin baby, and it can't hurt—but I'm thinking of weaning her to a bottle. There's no sense in trying to get her to drink from a cup. Still not talking. Dr. Heilman says she has perfectly good vocal cords, and to give it time.
On my second birthday:
Still no words from our little Zippy. She is otherwise a delight and a very sweet baby. I have turned her life over to God, to do with as He sees fit. I believe He must have a very special plan for her, because I'm sure that terrible staph infection in her ear that nearly killed her when she was a newborn must have, as the doctors feared, reached her brain. She is so quiet we hardly know she is here, and so unlike many of our friends, we can speak freely in front of her without fear she will repeat us. Little Becky Dawson walked up to Agnes Johnson in church last Sunday and called her Broad As A Barn. You know she heard that at home. We are very grateful for our little angel on her second birthday.
This entry was made on a separate piece of paper:
I've been thinking about first words, and so before I forget, here are some other important ones:
Melinda: Mama
Danny: No
Bob: Me (Mom Mary thought this was so cute; she says she first thought he was saying ma ma ma but really he was saying me me me)
My first word, of course, was Magazine.
The other day I overheard Melinda saying her night-time prayers, and she was asking that someday her little sister be able to tie her shoes. Bless her heart. We all hope as much.
Under favorite activities, Mom recorded:
God's Own Special Angel: Our Miracle Baby!
Far and away her favorite activity is rocking. She has her own rocking chair, and Bob rocks her to sleep every night. She is now refusing to take naps in her baby bed; if I try putting her down she doesn't cry or make any noise, but holds on to the rail and bounces so hard and for so long that I fear for her little spinal cord. She is not content until I put her on her rocking horse, where she bounces hard enough to cause it to hop across the floor. Eventually she grows weary and begins rocking, and then the rocking slows down, and finally she puts her head down on the hard, plastic mane and falls asleep, and I am able to move her to her bed.
Dr. Heilman is finally recognizing that all of this might be due to the fact that her umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck three times when she was born. I'm not sure why that has caused her not to grow any hair, however. She does have a few precious wisps, which I slick together with baby oil in order to put in a barrette or a ribbon.
Also she loves to go camping. Went fishing for the first time when she was only three weeks old! Her daddy is starting early! She carries a bottle with her everywhere she goes (which is everywhere). Everyone thinks I should have weaned her (she is now 30 months), but I just don't have the heart to take anything away from her.
This letter, written in my mom's tiny, precise script, was placed haphazardly in the middle of the book:
Dearest Little One: I don't know if you'll ever be able to read this, but there's a story I think you should know. When you were only five weeks old, just a tiny, tiny baby, you became very ill. You ran a terribly high fever, and would not stop crying, night and day. The doctors said you had a staph infection in your ear, and that there was nothing they could do. Dr. Heilman was out of town, and we were sent to his replacement. He told us you could die at home or in the hospital. We took you home, and I didn't sleep for days. In desperation your father called our dear friends Ruth and Roland Wiser, and they drove down to Mooreland from Gary. Gary, Indiana, sweetheart, which is hours and hours away! You father locked me in the Driftwood, our little camper, and Ruth and Roland stayed up all night, taking turns walking you so I could sleep. The next day I took you back to the doctor. He told us there was a new kind of medicine, an antibiotic, that might possibly help you, but he was not reassuring. He said there were twenty-six varieties of this medicine (the same as the alphabet); that probably only one would do you any good, and that he couldn't possibly know which one to prescribe, because they were so new. He showed me a sample case of them, little vials lined up along a spectrum, and then he just reached in and plucked one out and told me to try it. I could tell he knew it was hopeless.
We took you home and gave you the medicine. You cried yourself to sleep, and I, too, fell asleep rocking you. Just before I nodded off I told God plainly that I was letting you go, that I was delivering you into His hands. When I woke up you were silent, and I knew you were gone. I felt something damp against my arm, and when I pulled back your baby blanket, I saw that the infection had broken and run out your ear. Your skin was cool and covered with sweat, and you were sleeping deeply.
When Dr. Heilman came home he told us that the resident had been right—there was only one medicine that would have saved you, and he plucked it blindly out of the case. Dr. Heilman calls you his "Miracle Baby" now. Olive Overton, my dear friend from church, says that she knew you before you were born, and that it took you some time to decide whether or not you wanted to stay in this world.
I thought you ought to know about Ruth and Roland. What they did was what it means to love someone. We are all so grateful you decided to stay.
