Items related to One of a Kind Mallie
Living in Indiana during World War I, ten-year-old Mallie longs to be seen as different from her identical twin and finds an example of individuality in the gypsies who moved into her community.
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From the Author:
I welcome Hazel Rochman's review, and disagree.
As a writer of historical fiction for childen, I take great pride in the accuracy of my research and writing. In her Booklist review, Hazel Rochman writes that she believes my portrayal of the gypsy characters in One-of-a-Kind Mallie is stereotyped; she quotes my Author's Note, "They are shadowy people," and asks, "Shadowy to whom?"
About the Author:
As a writer of historical fiction for childen, I take great pride in the accuracy of my research and writing. In her Booklist review, Hazel Rochman writes that she believes my portrayal of the gypsy characters in One-of-a-Kind Mallie is stereotyped; she quotes my Author's Note, "They are shadowy people," and asks, "Shadowy to whom?"
I wish that she had quoted further: "Gypsies still exist. They are shadowy people, and surprisingly little is known about them. Most of them originally came from Eastern Europe; many even now speak a language called Romany [mentioned in the text] and have dark hair and eyes. But they came to America from many countries. They have different traditions and cannot all be lumped into one group." In truth, gypsies are shadowy: there are no collections of gypsy writings, no first-person documents from gypsies themselves. And, in fact, for my book I was not the least bit concerned with how any gypsies live today. My book is set in 1919, in rural Indiana, and is written entirely from the point-of-view of a ten-year-old girl; I needed to know how gypsies looked, acted, and were commonly perceived at that time.
Fortunately I was able to find several photographs of gypsies from that era. I also found and studied a compilation of oral histories taken from the residents of an Indiana town about the gypsies who passed through every year before World War I. I strongly believe that my book is not stereotyped; that, though Ms. Rochman may not like it, it does accurately portray gypsies in that place and time.
When we write of other time periods we must always resist the temptation to make them better or worse than they were. We can not change reality to suit our sensibilities.
I welcome any comments from readers. My e-mail address is mbbradley@naxs.com.
Kimberly Brubaker Bradley was born in 1967 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. After receiving her bachelor's degree from Smith College, she worked as a research chemist, then became a freelance writer. Her first novel, B>Ruthie's Gift, which introduced the character of Mallie, won her a Publishers Weekly "Flying Start" honor. She and her husband, Bart, have two children, Matthew and Katie. They live in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, where they are hard at work building a farm.
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- PublisherDemco Media
- Publication date2000
- ISBN 10 0606200207
- ISBN 13 9780606200202
- BindingPaperback
- Rating
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