A Girl Named Zippy

Hello, everyone. I thought I'd start my first post on this blog with my favorite book ever.

Now, there are categories of favorite books. Some books you read over and over because they're like Ramen: easy to eat and slightly mushy. That's the entire works of L.M. Montgomery for me, especially Anne of Green Gables. I've probably read the entire series two dozen times, mostly between the ages of 8 and 16. It drove my mom crazy. I'll be addressing that series in a later post, mostly because I finally re-read them for the first time in almost nine years. (I was that burned out on them.) And they were just as good, if not better, than I remembered.

Then there are the books you say are your favorites because you want to look smart in front of other people. For instance, I love Ray Bradbury in small amounts. Something Wicked This Way Comes is one of the most beautifully-written, gripping books I've ever read, and it's just one creepy little book. But the descriptions...! the characters...! the ending! I read it and I despair of ever being an author. And Ray Bradbury is one that you can trot out in intellectual circles and people look over their designer glasses at you and say, "Quite."

This book falls in neither category. I can only think of two people (out of the bajillion plus) I've recommended this book to that loved it almost as much as I did. One was my husband (surprise!). One was my sister. My husband loved it because it made him laugh so hard that we had to pull off the highway while he wheezed and wiped the tears of mirth off his glasses. My sister loved it for the same reason that I did: this little girl was me.

There are some marked differences, yes. Haven "Zippy" Jarvis was raised by a detatched mom who burrowed into their living room couch, reading, for years. She toiled not, neither did she spin. (We'll talk about the Zippy sequel, She Got Up Off the Couch, at a later date.) Zippy's dad was a smooth-talking, handsome, do-nothing dad who gambled for a living. Zippy had two siblings: a sister who pinched her in the soft place under her arm while they were sitting in their Quaker church on Sundays, and a brother who was handsome and furious.

Plot-wise, this autobiography is just as skimpy as I've laid it out here. What makes this book so heart-wrenchingly funny is the fact that you read it, and you see things exactly as a seven year old sees them. Consider this excerpt:

My dad asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I said I'd have to think about it...[One] night, just before I fell asleep, I realized what I wanted to be...I went outside, where my dad was puttering in his tool shed, and told him I wanted to belong to the Mafia. He asked what did I mean when I said that, and I said like in the movies, and he nodded.

A few days later he came home with a framed certificate printed on very genuine yellow paper that said I was an official, lifetime member of the Mafia. Some of it was in Italian and some of it was just in an Italian accent. A man named Leonardo "The Lion" Gravitano Salvatore had signed it with a tall, threatening signature.

After that my life changed, and I mean for the better. Hardly anyone ever bothered me, except for my sister, who must have belonged to whatever is bigger and meaner than the Mafia. Maybe the Jehovah's Witnesses. She dared even to lock me out of the house one night when my parents were away, when there was a bat on the front porch that was clearly diseased and looking for hair. My brother came from out of nowhere and unlocked the door, and just in time, too. Back in the house I gave my sister a whole host of menacing, Italian faces, which she pretended to ignore.

Please, do yourself a favor and read this book. It's clever without being sharp, tender without being mushy, and honest without being preachy. It's the best book I've ever read.