Going on Nine
Catherine Underhill Fitzpatrick, 2014
Familius
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781939629128
Summary
At the dawn of a heat-soaked St. Louis summer, in a suburban neighborhood no different from any other, eight-year-old Grace Mitchell embarks on a doomed quest, searching for what is right under her nose: A better family than her own wonderful family.
As the summer of 1956 stretches, long and languid, before them, Grace and her pals on Thistle Way are soon virtually feral, roaming unfettered from apricot dawn to lavender dusk. They entertain themselves by popping tar bubbles in the street, playing tag across eight back yards, plundering forts in the verges and catching tadpoles in creeks, by swiping Popsicle from freezers humming in musty darkness and snatching root beer barrels from open boxes up at Snyder’s Five and Dime. It’s the suburbs, and the Fifties.
The mothers and fathers of Thistle Way do not hover, counting their children’s every breath. One day in early June, Grace swipes her mother’s diamond engagement ring, snatches her sister’s new white nightgown, and runs outside to play bride. In short order, she loses the ring, rips the gown, correctly assumes it’s about to rain daggers, and marches off to find somewhere else to live, somewhere better. When her parents, in their wisdom, suggest Grace test the waters by spending two nights with each family on Thistle Way, the child bolts upstairs to pack her red plaid suitcase.
Going on Nine is the story of an eight-year-old girl’s serial encampments as she samples life within the households of a dozen friends and neighbors―each at a turning point. On her journeys, Grace travels on foot and on horseback, rides shotgun in a new Plymouth Belvedere and hunkers in the back of a rattletrap vegetable truck. One day she crawls into a crumbling tunnel. Following that, she treks out to a fire in the hinterlands, explores the closet of a prom queen, keeps vigil in the bedroom of a molestation victim, tames a killer dog, and holds an old woman’s life in the palm of her hand. With good reason, Grace remembers that long-ago summer for the rest of her life, and looks back on it with wise perspective as a mature woman decades later.
At summer’s end, the Mitchell family moves to a new neighborhood. With her days on Thistle Way drawing to a close, Grace is devastated. But she’s learned a timeless truth: Families and friendships are nuanced in ways imperceptible to their neighbors, judging at a distance.
Written for adult readers, each chapter of Going on Nine is a story unto itself, told in the unique, real-time voice of eight-year-old Grace and, alternately, in wise hindsight by the adult Grace today.
Peppered with humor, leavened with adversity, nostalgic but not cloying, Going on Nine explores universal themes of childhood longing and parental love, and shows the 1950s for what they truly were―an era as fabled and flawed as any other.