Eleven-year-old Kammie Summers is desperate to dodge the shadow of her imprisoned father's shameful crime. She's so determined to make a fresh start in her new life in Texas, she ignores all the warning signs when a group of popular sixth-grade girls invites her to be initiated into their club. They make her stand on an old well cover, which, inevitably, breaks. Soon she's paying the consequences--at the bottom of a well.
The Girl in the Well Is Me is a hypnotic, utterly original novel by Canadian author Karen Rivers (Finding Ruby Starling; The Encyclopedia of Me). Kammie is smart, real and wickedly funny. Her plummet into the well is paralleled by a devastating descent into introspection. The gradually building effects of oxygen deprivation are so subtly woven into Kammie's wandering, worried and sometimes humorous musings, it isn't until she's speaking in French to a silver coyote and considering the allergenic effects of goat zombies that the reader fully realizes how far she has slipped, literally and figuratively. When a firefighter shouts down to her from the well opening, Kammie thinks: "This hatted man-angel, unemployed coal miner must think I'm very dumb, but he doesn't know I have the brain power of all of us in the well."
Guilt and forgiveness, truth and lies, family and self, friendship and social hierarchy--this novel doesn't so much tackle these subjects as absorb them into its natural fiber. Readers will have compassion, even love, for Kammie, and the suspense and anxiety of her situation will leave every reader breathless until the final page. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor