Amanda Davis (1)Reseñas

this was a phenomenal story!

This is a book I almost stopped reading because the beginning was very dark and just seemed to be getting darker and weirder but decided to hang in there keep reading and I am so glad I did. Faith Duckle is fat, really fat, with a food nag for a mother. Faith's father passed away when she was younger, and she is an only child, so there is no buffer between her and her mother. Like any teenager, Faith just wants to be liked, to belong. During Homecoming when she is 15, Faith is manipulated and fooled by some of the boys at her school with tragic consequences for Faith and which sends her into a downward spiral. After a stay in a mental institution, Faith is now very thin but still mentally on the edge, and the "fat girl" is with her all the time telling her what to do and who to trust and who not to trust. Eventually, the "fat girl" acts out on Faith's anger in a horrific way, and this sends Faith on the run looking for Charles, the brother of her friend from the mental institution. Charles had saved his own sister numerous times, and so Faith thought maybe he could save her. This search for Charles leads Faith to join the circus, change her name to Annabelle, and get beyond the "fat girl" and find the real Faith. What follows is healing and growth in a coming-of-age story like no other I've ever read. This unique character and original story will stay with me for a long time.½

Wonder When You'll Miss Me has to be one of the most heartbreaking books I've ever read. Not only because of the plot itself, but because the author of this marvelous book passed away in a plane crash while promoting it, not long after it was published. This book (and Davis' collection of short stories) remains all that is left of Amanda Davis for us readers.

Wonder When You'll Miss me is an engaging read. It's sort of a trainwreck read where you know something bad is going to happen, yet you can't really pull yourself away. Written with wonderful prose, we readers, get catapulted into Faith's world. Faith's a girl that any teenager could identify with due to her lack of self-esteem that is originally stemmed by her weight is worsened by a brutal attack inflicted upon her by some boys from her school. Once Faith reaches the point of no return, she runs away and joins the circus.

Ahhh, the circus! Everytime I read any book that has a circus in it as a major part of the setting, I get this overwhelming need to actually go to a circus (I haven't been to one in years). I get this sense of nostalgia and have memories flooding back to me of being a kid sitting on those bleachers, entranced by the elephants and terrified of the clowns. The circus in Wonder When You'll Miss Me is less glamorous than one would hope life in a circus would be. But it is still full of wonder. You would think hearing about the same tasks that Faith performs for the circus over and over again would become tedious, but they do not. If anything, those were the parts I enjoyed the most because let's face it: every kid dreams of running away to the circus at least once during their childhood. There's just this sense of magic in the circus that no one wants to escape. A pull to something more innocent. We readers can see why Faith would be drawn to such a world.

Wonder When You'll Miss Me was a tremendous novel. You have a heroine who just breaks your heart and who you root for, regardless of the terrible thing she did. While the comic moments are few and far between, they're still there and some of them help to lighten the mood a bit. Wonder When You'll Miss Me is a book about trying to let go of your past while being confronted with it at every turn. It's a book about keeping your faith regardless.

Wonder When You'll Miss Me is a bittersweet book because it is so amazing. However, it's terrible because it is the last work we'll ever have from Amanda Davis, who you could just tell from reading this book, had tremendous talent and would've gone on to write tons of other amazing books. Never again will we be able to read her beautiful prose or have one of her amazingly developed heroines capture our hearts completely the way that Faith did. Amanda Davis' death is a tragedy not only for those who knew her, but for us as readers, and for the literary world as a whole.

I picked this up at the library and liked it so much I paid them to let me take it home. Davis' writing is surreal and vivid, she writes about people we all know of, but may not ever meet. Her stories carry a hint of the magical. Amanda Davis died in plane crash a few years ago. Before her death she saw one other book published, Wonder When You'll Miss Me, also a great read.

This book begins with the revelation of a horrible event in a young woman's life. The details unfold as the novel progresses, and the reader is able to fell the pain and to understand the fragmentation of her personality to include "the fat girl." Joining the circus is an effort to belong somewhere after committing an act of violence against herself. This book has several levels, but it does come together at the end when the adolescent "coming of age" evolves and the dual personality is merged. I did have a little trouble keeping all the circus characters straight once they began to interact with Annabelle. This seems like a book that would do well in sequel form to find out how Faith's life continues.

Faith was an overweight teenager that was until she was sexually assaulted and tried to kill herself. Now she has lost the weight and is returning to her life. The fat girl is the only person that Faith confides in, that is until she meets Charlie. Now Faith decides to get even and then run away to find Charlie and the circus. This book is filled with advanced topics that may be offensive to some groups. This book could be useful for students in helping them understand more about mental illness and recovery.½

Nothing new, inventive, or exciting about this collection of stories.

Notes:
Roller coaster story of girl who is gang raped at highschool event. Her pain and suicide attempt then weight loss encompass two vast topics of mental health and adolescent anxiety. Hard to imagine a book that could encorporate so much and remain readable. Recommend this for 15 and up.

I am not sure why I didn't like this novel more than I did. I guess in the end it just didn't work for me... the writing constantly brought up two conflicting emotions - there was the absurdity of the the circus while at the same time there were the tragic circumstances of how she got there... it made for a strange and constant roll between those two feelings that didn't exactly flow or work for me. It kept my attention though - and it was a unique story.½

Faith Among the Elephant Dung

Reviewed by David Abrams



How can a story that begins with the gang rape of a 15-year-old girl end on such an upbeat note 250 pages later with that same girl standing in a circus tent dreaming of spiritual liberation as a trapeze artist? How can a novel go from grim to grand in a brief, whispery page-turn?

If you're a novelist named Amanda Davis, the answer is something like a trapeze act itself: deceptively simple from the audience's point of view, but high up near the big-top roof, the flip-fall-catch is one of muscle, grace and, above all, timing.

In her novel Wonder When You'll Miss Me, Amanda Davis, like a trapeze gymnast, knows how to dazzle her audience with a literary act that disobeys the rules of gravity and leaves us, heart in throat, wishing it would never end.

Unfortunately, the novel does and, sadder yet, so did the short happy life of Ms. Davis. On March 14, Amanda died when the small plane her father was piloting during a promotional tour for the novel crashed into a North Carolina mountain. A sad story, but for those of us who didn't know her personally, it is just one more obituary on a page already filled with good, decent people who have gone to the hereafter. Just another obit, that is, until you read Wonder When You'll Miss Me or Davis' collection of short stories, Circling the Drain. Then the loss can be a profound, smothering weight. Nothing else will spring fresh from Amanda Davis' imagination; we're left with just two thin volumes of words.

It's both joy and agony that those words are so good, so dead-on target as Davis describes the pain of lonely adolescent life. If there's any comfort to be had in news of the author's cut-short life, it's that Wonder When You'll Miss Me is the kind of novel that will endure. Even though it's marketed as adult fiction, this is really the kind of story to be read by teens -- males and females alike -- going through that horrible, bumpy transition into adulthood.

Faith Duckle, the overweight girl who's assaulted under the bleachers during her school's Homecoming game, is a kind of Everyteen -- we've all had bits of Faith's loneliness and optimism-against-all-odds at one point in our lives. Davis hones in on Faith's troubled psyche so quickly and accurately that we immediately embrace the girl as an intimate friend. Faith is the kind of character who steps off the page in the first paragraph.

After the attack by the group of boys, described in stark but subtle terms (I stared at buckles and pockets. He pinched my nose so my mouth fell open. Then the terrible sound of zippers…), Faith tries to commit suicide, ends up in a mental hospital, and sheds 48 pounds before her release. She returns to school as a renewed Faith, but she is dogged by the presence of her former self, which manifests itself as Fat Girl.

While constantly stuffing her face with junk food, Fat Girl is a menacing, nagging ghost who dispenses advice like: "There are all kinds of anger. Some kinds are just more useful than others." She dogs Faith's shadow, insisting that the teen might be able to shed pounds, but she'll never lose the person she was. There were days when she was a comfort and days when she was a nightmare, Faith says. Eventually, she becomes more of a nightmare after she convinces Faith to revenge the rape.

The "character" of Fat Girl is a marvelous stroke on Davis' part because, honestly, we can never fully leave our selves back in teenhood. We may move on, but something always clings. Wonder When You'll Miss Me is all about the process of un-clinging the bad debris while coming to terms with the bits that can't be shaken loose.

In Faith's case, this means running away to join the circus (something Davis herself did for several months). She renames herself Annabelle and is taken on by the Fartlesworth Circus as it tours the Eastern seaboard. She begins by picking up trash around the midway, then works her way up to assisting with costumes, grooming the elephants and, eventually, practicing with the trapeze artists. Along the way, we watch as she grows from frightened, easily-manipulated girl to a self-confident, brave fighter willing to somersault through life without a net.

Part of Wonder When You'll Miss Me's appeal is Davis' no-nonsense style which makes Faith such an accessible character. But it's also filled with an array of details about circus life which place us effortlessly inside that bizarre culture, turning even a description of an elephant performance into an authentic glimpse of the big top:

It was loud inside. We stopped at the edge of the ring. In one graceful move, Olivia bent her head, Jim stepped up on her trunk, and she lifted him into the air, then began to walk again and Bluebell followed. I let go of her harness and stayed at the edge of the ring and did my best to smile, but I felt the heat of the lights and the people all around us, looking, their eyes like tiny hot bullets thumping me from all sides. I couldn't focus on anything, not even what Jim was doing. The sawdust made me want to sneeze, and trying not to made my eyes water. There was a strange soupiness to it all. My heart hammered away and everything sparkled. The band played tinny music so loud it seemed to echo in and out of every crevice, bouncing wildly around the enormous tent. I grinned until my jaw ached.
Just as the circus transforms Faith into a girl with a sequin-speckled future, Davis turns her descriptions of circus life into small parables about how it's possible to find beauty, even among the sawdust and elephant dung:

I liked this feeling of lightness. It was what I imagined the world felt like from up on the trapeze, what Mina the Ballerina must know. It was what I imagined it felt like to fall when you saw the outstretched hands before you and knew you would come out of a spin and be caught. It was this lightness, this emptiness, this trust that you weren't about to plummet to an unforgiving surface, powered by the weight of yourself. No. You would spin and be caught, you would flip and fall and catch, and you would swing back to a platform at the end, arms in the air, high above the crowd, proud of your victory over what hadn't happened.
There are times when the novel feels like scattered bits and pieces, as if it had been written in fits and starts -- something akin to a teenager's diary. But when you reach the final page, when you come to the epiphanic moments of the book, those disjointed passages coalesce beautifully, even transcendently.

At one low point, Faith frets, I didn't matter. I saw that. I didn't matter at all. But, in truth, she does matter -- she matters a great deal, especially to any young people reading Wonder When You'll Miss Me and thinking they are the only lonely teenagers on the planet. More important, Amanda Davis matters; and her words -- the only things most of us will ever know her by -- matter the most.

In the final pages, Faith confides, I wanted to believe that I was not so easily replaced.

She's not, and neither is Amanda Davis.½