A Ceiling of Stars (Ag Fiction (American Girl)) - Softcover

Grade 5-7-This fast-paced, contemporary story is told through letters and journal entries. Vivien is 12 years old the summer she and her widowed, alcoholic mother set out from Ohio to Oregon. Near Denver, her mother leaves to find work and doesn't return to their campsite. The girl makes her way to the city and is befriended by some homeless people, who tell her that her mother has been seen drinking and dancing in various bars. Vivien stays in a teen shelter for several weeks, where she learns that her mother has been hospitalized because of her drinking. Soon after, the child runs away, frightened by a predatory taxi driver, and sleeps on the streets until she is arrested and agrees to live in a foster home. Unfortunately, while the format lends immediacy to the action, the absence of dialogue and Vivien's cursory descriptions result in flat characters who behave in stereotypical ways. Her father is said to be a "dreamer" and her mother, a "loser." Readers learn little of the circumstances of their plight. June Rae Wood's A Share of Freedom (Putnam, 1994) is alsoabout children enduring the ills of an alcoholic parent and has more fully realized characters.
Laura Scott, Baldwin Public Library, Birmingham, MI
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

There's not much to recommend in this stilted and mawkish tale of homelessness and redemption. As her mother disappears into drunkenness, Vivien, 12, named by her father for the Lady of the Lake, clings to the Arthurian tales he told her before he died. Vivien makes friends among the homeless in Denver, and even finds a place to stay in Arch House, where runaway teens can be safe, but she finds the lure of the streets irresistible. The book is told in journal entries and through letters Vivien writes to relatives whose addresses she doesn't have. Creel romanticizes homelessness, inhabits her novel with simplistic good guys and bad guys - even a puppy. The result is neither persuasive nor satisfying. (Fiction. 9-12) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.