Fiction Pick of the Week: The Talk-Funny Girl
Marjorie is the seventeen-year-old “talk funny” girl whose first person recollection of her upbringing in a poor rural area of New Hampshire is the basis of this compelling novel. Her parents are completely isolated from the community with their own mountain hybrid dialect that makes Marjorie a subject of teasing at school and abuse at home. Her distrust of adults is well entrenched, learned from the actions of her parents and a sadistic minister, and heightened by the unsolved abductions and murders of several young girls. Only the kindness of an aunt and a young stoneworker, with a dream of building a “real cathedral” out of the debris of an old church, can save her.
This novel is captivating, the suspense low grade but building to an unexpected ending It is apparent from the opening chapter that Marjorie, with her inspiring resilience, finds her way out of this hopelessness. Having lost her dialect as an adult, she is aptly able to express herself: “I wanted to go back and hunt it down and close the hurt museum for good though I discovered you cannot really do that. What you can do, what you have to do is not pass much of it on.” It is a journey and a moral lesson the reader will remember.
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