Good Reads: Whistling In the Dark

The loss of innocence can be as dramatic as the loss of a parent or the discovery that what's perceived to be truth can actually be a big fat lie, as shown in Kagen's compassionate debut, a coming-of-age thriller set in Milwaukee during the summer of 1959. Ten-year-old Sally O'Malley fears that a child predator who has already murdered two girls, Junie Piaskowski and Sara Heinemann, will target her or her little sister, Troo, next. Sally's mom is in the hospital, while her big sister, Nell, is distracted by love and her stepdad, Hall, by the bottle, so who can save her if the killer is, as she suspects, her neighbor, David Rasmussen, a popular cop who has a photo of Junie hanging in his house?  .

And now for one of my Favorite Books of All Time! This book amazed me with some hysterically funny parts, some truly chilling scary parts, some sober dramatic parts....it is every element you could want in a story, all wrapped in one!

I literally could not put this down. Sally O'Malley is one of the most engaging characters I have come across in a long time, and Mrs. Kagen has a wonderful way with dialogue. I loved the setting of this, having a nostalgic yearning for a decade I never lived in, and the plot was certainly roller-coaster. This is definitely in my Top Five Favorites list...read it, read it, read it!