supercheesegirl

Full title: She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana. I absolutely adore Haven Kimmel's writing, she's so funny and sharp. The book picks up where A Girl Named Zippy leaves off. As hinted in the title of this book, Kimmel's mother indeed gets herself up off the couch, puts herself through college, and earns a master's degree, losing over 100 pounds in the process, but not without causing some considerable strife in her marriage. Haven/Zippy is 12 or so as this is happening, and seeing her mom go through this has a big effect on her. She's also at the right age to start noticing the rifts in her parents' marriage--and this is written about so well, an undertone running throughout the book, just as Zippy herself would have felt it. I do hope that Kimmel keeps writing her childhood, because I want to know what happens next when all hell breaks loose.

We also get a lot of the sorts of scenes we had in Zippy: fun family anecdotes, slumber parties with her girlfriends, the typical things you'd expect for an adolescent girl in the '70's. The broken arm scene was riveting, but still told with Kimmel's distinctive voice and humor. She's a terrific writer. Highly recommended, but read Zippy first because you won't want to miss any of it.