As part of the fabulous Pulpwood Queens our book club gets to discover lots of different books and their authors. During the last Girlfriend’s Weekend, I met quite a few. One author was Lesley Kagen who wrote Whistling in the Dark.  I’ll have a few more posts on other discoveries from that Weekend as my book club reads them.

The author is quite the entrepreneur. She’s also an actress, voice-over talent and a restaurateur.  Where she finds the time…. Her book Whistling in the Dark takes me back to my own childhood. We were pushed out the door by 9 am on Saturday and expected back for dinner around 6.  Somewhere in the neighborhood we would grab a p&j at someone’s home around 1. We were unsupervised and left to our own devices.  We made up games and entertained ourselves with made up stories and adventures. No one worried about child predators.

The novel introduces us to the O’Malley family in the summer of 1959 in Milwaukee. Sally O’Malley had promised her father on his deathbed that she would look after her sister Troo and keep her safe. But life had other plans. Sally’s mother had remarried an alcoholic and was in the hospital battling cancer. The stepfather abandoned Sally, Troo and their older sister Nell. Food was scarce and so was big-sister, Nell, who was more interested in her boyfriend then her sisters. 

Sally’s ten-year-old imagination goes into overdrive as two young girls go missing. She is convinced that her sister Troo will be next. Sally is spooked by all the attention a local cop is giving her and thinks maybe he’s the murderer. The tale spins as we follow the story through the eyes of this bright, inquisitive young girl.  

My book club loved this book. We talked about the freedom of our childhoods. No supervision, going from one neighbor’s home to the next with no thought of danger. No scheduled play dates.  We discussed the difference between our childhoods and our children’s. We all loved the detail and richness of this story. We felt like we were there running in the neighborhood or bicycling down by the lake. But the story really highlights the vulnerability of the children of this (our) era.

Pick up the book for your book club. It’s fun to reminisce.

Rating: 8   

Photo by Piron Guillaume on Unsplash