Champeen: A Novel

This book is a riveting story of life in a small rural town and the joys and heartbreaks of growing up. I loved the storytelling of Heather Ross Miller, and felt like I was in Badin NC, sweltering in the summer heat! Can't wait till her next book is published this fall to hear her wonderful storytelling voice once again! I give this book 5 stars!!!

I may be a bit biased in my review of CHAMPEEN as I have the priviledge of KNOWING and LIKING ALOT, Heather Ross Miller. She is a smart, very funny lady, she can turn a trip to the grocery store into a funny story, she is the type of person you love to sit with and and chat with, but mostly LISTEN to. This is how I felt while reading her "CHAMPEEN". It is a wonderful story, actually a whole lotta stories in a story, some very funny, some very sad. Being a woman myself, I could relate alot to the main character, TITANIA, both as a woman and as a young girl turning 13. The classic teen-age crush on an older guy, the fantasies of doing something GREAT, like twirling fire in Titania's case-----wanting to be loved and adored by all. Heather, to me, is a master story-teller, who can take everyday ordinary people we encounter and turn them into funny caricatures. For example, Titania's alcoholic father who captures the neighborhood yappy, irritating rat-dog and gives him a bath in their tub, which infuriates Titania's perfect mother, a woman who wants everything and everyone around her to be perfect. And there is the fat preacher who comes to Badin to baptize lost souls in the lake, only to fall into it himself------his speech is a riot, I just loved how she wrote it. I strongly recommend this book for both readers AND writers, as I think Heather is a great writer, a master of words. And I know she is dedicated to her craft, she has written forever, and she has the story-telling genes in her, as her father was a writer, her uncle, her aunt, etc. In closing, I give CHAMPEEN an enormous THUMBS UP, and I am even going to read it again after I am finished with my current book.