January 4, 1999
The setting for this nostalgic coming-of-age first novel is the last "polio summer" of 1954, just before the Salk vaccine ended the annual poliomyelitis epidemics. With the Bainbridge, Ala., swimming pools and movie theater closed, and fear and germs in the air, eight-year-old narrator Tabitha "Tab" Goodloe Rutland, her 13-year-old friend Maudie May, and Maudie's two young brothers--who can speak but don't or won't--build a hideout and christen it Fort Polio, the scariest name they can think of. Near a creek and hidden by kudzu (the official flower of Southern literature), the fort affords the perfect vantage point from which to watch the local bootlegger and his seemingly respectable customers. Here they plot to free the neighbor boy whose mother makes him stay inside the house all summer, and ponder the truths they read in Silver Screen. Meanwhile, Tab's mother, considered a northerner because she was born in Tennessee, seeks acceptance in the exclusive Ladies Help League. Devoto's story has its charming moments, but Tab's voice is often cloying, the ending is contrived and much of the narrative has a by-the-numbers quality. Roy Rogers makes a brief appearance at the beginning, then vanishes with his white hat and reassuring promise that justice triumphs, just as Tab begins to realize that it doesn't.
December 1, 1999
YA-Life is easy and innocent for 10-year-old Tabitha Rutland, narrator of this novel about one "typical" 1950s summer in Bainbridge, AL. Tab and Maudie build a fort in the kudzu, and watch Mr. Jake sell his bootleg liquor to a range of customers including the mayor. But life in this Southern town is not as easy as it seems. Mama is rejected from the Ladies Help League because she expresses progressive opinions and is a Northerner (from Knoxville, TN). Tab's friend John spends the summer in his basement, being protected (so his mother hopes) from the local polio epidemic. Then there is the unspoken issue of racism. Tab and Maudie play together in their "Fort Polio," and window-shop together for Roy Rogers lunch boxes. But at the movies, Tab sits downstairs, and Maudie joins the other "Colored" folks in the balcony. Time seems to be passing Bainbridge by this summer, but then something happens that will change life in this bastion of traditional Southern culture forever. Like the narrators in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Olive Burns's Cold Sassy Tree, Tab is both childlike and wise; the story is both humorous and poignant. Devoto provides a highly readable and entertaining novel packed full of rich and delightful dialogue, funny situations and vignettes, and all-to-human insights and drama.-Becky Ferrall, Stonewall Jackson High School, Manassas, VA
Copyright 1999 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from November 15, 1998
Writing as if she were the literary love child of Harper Lee and Mark Twain, Devoto gives us small-town Bainbridge, Alabama, in summer 1954--the last "polio summer" in America, a time when municipal swimming pools and even movie houses were shut down for fear of contagion. Ten-year-old tomboy Tab's mother is an outsider in Bainbridge, a "northerner" from Tennessee who will never fit into the tightly knit town hierarchy overseen by Grace Poovey, matriarch of the ladies' society. Tab's best friend is Maudie May, a light-skinned black girl who invites her into a club, hitherto consisting of Maudie and her two baby brothers, that meets in a kudzu-covered fort adjacent to a mean old moonshiner whose boat the girls steal so that they can catch catfish for the money Maudie needs to buy her brothers school supplies. But the boat gets caught in the current and breaks up, etc., etc. Intermixed with the high jinks are keys to some of the sleepy town's darker secrets, which betray the racism and class prejudice prevalent in the middle of the twentieth century. What with DeVoto making such a delightful debut, her next appearance in print can't come too soon. ((Reviewed November 15, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)