Icy Sparks (Hardcover)

Written in the distinctive Southern tradition of such writers as Olive Ann Burns and Eudora Welty, this amazing first novel tells the sad, funny, transcendent story of a young girl growing up in Appalachia with Tourette's syndrome. Eastern Kentucky, 1956. Life is hard and sweet for ten-year-old Icy Sparks. Try as she might, her secrets - those croaks, jerks, and spasms - keep slipping out. Her teachers think she's willful, her friends call her "the Frog Child." Exiled from the schoolroom, she spends time in a children's asylum, where she learns about being different and teaches her doctors even more. Yet it is not until Icy returns home that she truly begins to flower, through her friendship with the eccentric and obese Miss Emily. Under Miss Emily's tutelage, Icy takes her first steps back into the world, including her first hilarious and heartbreaking misadventures with romance.