FAITH, HOPE, AND IVY JUNE
by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Delacorte Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 9780385736152
Ages 9-12
288 pages
In a note at the back of FAITH, HOPE, AND IVY JUNE, readers learn that the book had its genesis in Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s National Endowment for the Arts grant, during which she and her husband traveled through the rural communities of West Virginia and Kentucky, seeing coal country firsthand. In her insightful new novel, Naylor manages to bring both that tourist’s curiosity and an insider’s perspective to life, thanks to its unusual premise.
Ivy June Mosley lives deep in the mountains of Kentucky coal country. Her grandfather (Papaw) is a miner, looking forward to retirement after years spent underground, including more than one close call. Ivy June’s family doesn’t have a telephone or indoor plumbing. Her father, who can’t do much work because of a chronic lung condition, is dependent on Mamaw and Papaw’s generosity to keep their large family afloat.
Ivy June has never really thought about her family from an outsider’s perspective, but when she learns that she has won the opportunity to participate in a student exchange program with a girl from Lexington, she begins to worry about what her family’s home and activities will look like to a girl from outside. First, Ivy June will go to Lexington for two weeks to live with Catherine Combs’s family and attend her private school. Then Catherine will come to stay at Ivy June’s home, experiencing backwoods living. The idea is for the two girls to witness --- and report back on --- the amazing variety and common ties that exist in their diverse state.
Although both girls encounter some of the stereotypes they had expected (Ivy June is mortified when Catherine’s grandmother wants to take her shopping for new clothes; Catherine is horrified when she learns she’ll have to go a week between hair washes), their growing friendship convinces them that their commonalities overshadow their many differences. Nowhere does this become more apparent than when potential tragedies strike both their families during Catherine’s time in the mountains. As Catherine writes, “Sadness feels the same, whether it’s in Lexington or here in Thunder Creek.”
By utilizing a variety of narrative perspectives (each girl keeps a diary during the exchange, and in the novel, their entries alternate with third-person narratives of their experiences), Naylor manages to convey Catherine and Ivy June’s shifting understanding of their own lives in relation to others’, to make readers feel as if they themselves are having a rare glance to see very different lives firsthand. Along the way, the two consider such topics as faith, family and friendship, and their understanding of each is broadened and enriched through their opportunity to see “how the other half lives.”
FAITH, HOPE, AND IVY JUNE is both a perceptive, compassionate portrait of a kind of life that will seem foreign to most readers, and a thought-provoking exploration of how friendship can speak the same language even if it seems to arise from different worlds.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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