Tending to Grace

by Kimberly Newton Fusco

Book Overview

Lenore is Cornelia's mother--and Cornelia's fix-up project. What does it matter that Cornelia won't talk to anyone and is always stuck in the easiest English class at school, even though she's read... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375828621
• ISBN13: 9780375828621
• Release Date: May 2004
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 167 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.6"
• Age Range: 12 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 7 and higher

Customer Reviews

HI FIVE

TENDING TO GRACE IS A GOOD BOOK. It starts out driving with a family at the end of May on a silent day. What made me like this story was this line "the boyfirend". You can tell when she says the boyfriend its a problem. She doesn't like him. Carnelia, the main character in the story is about 15 and loves to read and doesn't talk to anybody because she has a speech problem. She doesn't like her mom's boyfriend. One day the boyfriend wants to go to Las Vegas and Mom talks to Carnelia. The next day mom drops her off with her Aunt Agatha. Carnelia, not knowing where she is going, didn't know she was in for a reality check. Moving in and having to deal with the way her aunt lives she really breaks out of her shell. During the process she is missing her mother at the same time. What I thought was good about this story was that it wasn't hard to get into. The author breaks everything down and makes me feel as if i were in the story. If you like stories with troubled teens in need of help, having a breakthrough, this is the book for you! sadequa

The Best Book I Have Ever Read! By AG From North Boulevard

I read the book and am reviewing Tending to Grace by Kimberly Newton Fusco. I gave it 5 stars. The book was amazing. It is about a girl Cornelia who is very shy and doesn't talk because she has a stutter. When her mother and her mother's boyfriend drop her off in the middle of nowhere at a distant aunt's house, Cornelia finds a new friendship with her after a while of them hating each other. This is a compelling story about courage, friendship, and strength. I would recommend it to people in fifth grade and up. It was a wonderful story.

Tending to Grace

When nearing the end of her freshman year in high school, shy Cornelia, who has a stutter, is up-rooted from home by her mother and mother's boyfriend, driven cross country and dropped off with her great-aunt in the Southwest. Aunt Agatha who lives alone in the country and is illiterate, is an unlikely parent, but as Cornelia teaches Agatha to read, Agatha teaches Cornelia to live. This book has an excellent message of hope and can be digested in small chunks. Good for high school/middle school students who think they do not like to read.

Finding Herself

This is the story of a young girl whose only control of her world is her silence. She has no father; her mother is the typical self-centered abusive by neglect example. Cornelia's only pleasure in life is her books. Cornelia's world is suddenly jolted as her mother physically abandons Corny to a distant relative. Agatha is the opposite of Corny in so many ways; dirty, disorganized, nature lover. Yet, she is just as independent as Corny. The story is the characters coming to need each other, and help each other, and grow in ways they couldn't expect. Corny eventually breaks her shell and stands for herself, at the same time as learning to lean on Agatha. It's really a beautiful story for a young girl who might find herself frustrated by the constriction of her own world. Corny is an unusual hero, but she is heroic, none the less. (*)>

Richie's Picks: TENDING TO GRACE

" 'Come on, Corns,' my mother says, opening the car door for me. 'Bring your stuff.' The boyfriend shrugs and turns up the radio."I wonder when a Girl Scout last sold cookies here. Not for a while, apparently, because the hem on my dress catches the grass as we trek to the front door."It's not going to be for that long, Corns. Just till Joe and me get settled.' My mother pushes some of the ivy aside and taps at the door. The skin on her hand is thin, translucent, like china held up to the light. I can hardly hear her knocks."I watch another bird fly across the yard and land on the roof and then an old woman walks around from the back of the house. She is tall and straight, pale as vanilla pudding, with gray hair twisted into a braid and roped around her head. Binoculars thump against her chest. My mother jumps a little when she sees her. 'Agatha.'" 'Tell him to turn that noise off.' The old woman nods to the car, but her eyes are on me."My mother looks unsure about what she should do. She takes a few steps forward (is she thinking of hugging the old woman?), then changes her mind and turns toward the car, leaving me standing with my crate of books at my feet."I hold my breath and hope the old woman doesn't talk. I watch another bird fly to the chimney. The boyfriend turns the radio down. 'Your phone isn't working,' my mother says when she walks back to us. Then she giggles in her nervous little way that's nails on a blackboard to me. 'I need someone to take her for a while.' " There are a bunch of memorable (and award-winning) stories that feature adolescent girls going to live with grandmothers or grandmother-types. Consider such pairings as Mary Alice and Grandma Dowdel, Dicey and Abigail Tillerman, Hollis Woods and Josie Cahill, and, in 2003, Ratchet Clark and those wacky twin nonagenarians Tilly and Penpen Menuto. Add TENDING TO GRACE to the cream of this intergenerational YA crop. "I am a bookworm, a bibliophile, a passionate lover of books. I know metaphor and active voice and poetic meter, and I understand that the difference between the right word and the almost right word, as Samuel Clemens said, is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."But I don't talk, so no one knows. All they see are the days I miss school, thirty-five one year, twenty-seven the next, forty-two the year after that. I am a silent red flag, waving to them, and they send me to their counselors and they ask me, 'When are you going to talk about it, Cornelia?' I wrap myself into a ball and squish the feelings down to my toes and they don't know what to make of me so they send me back to this class where we get the watered-down TOM SAWYER with pages stripped of soul and sentences as straight and flat as a train track. "We read that the new boy in TOM SAWYER ran like a deer, while the kids in the honors class read he 'turned tail and ran like an antelope.'"I know, because I read that book too." Cornelia Thornhill refuses to speak. If she were willing to sp