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Summary
Summary
Sixteen-year-old Dulci comes from a family of janitors in the town of Newbury, Connecticut. Her world crumbles with the sudden death of her father. She goes to California with her mother and does not like it there. She then steals her father's pick-up truck and returns home. She lives with her grandfather and slowly begins the process of healing.
Reviews (4)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 7-10-Her father's accidental death and her mother's unexpected decision to move them to California seem to be Defining Dulcie (Dial, 2006). Paul Acampora's novel explores what happens when 16-year-old Dulcie steals her deceased dad's truck and drives back to Connecticut. Her experiences during the road trip home add extra flavor to the story. Dulcie's stern, but loving grandfather is happy to have her home, but insists that Dulcie return to work with him at the high school where he is head custodian. It's also where Dulcie's father was a janitor and where he died. Dulcie and her new friend Roxanne work together that summer, sharing memories and learning to trust their feelings. Both teens confront painful truths about their families. In the end, Dulcie and her mother reconcile and Roxanne leaves her abusive home. Jennifer Ikeda's narration covers the range of emotions and personalities with subtly convincing tempo. Although the novel deals with the serious issues of loss and child abuse, there's also humor and compassion. A solid addition to public and high school libraries looking for audiobooks that encourage young people to be independent thinkers.-Barbara Wysocki, Cora J. Belden Library, Rocky Hill, CT (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Acampora deftly mixes the bitter with the sweet throughout this first novel. Sixteen-year-old Dulcie Morrigan Jones's father, a janitor at her high school, has just died as a result of inadvertently mixing together and inhaling two chemically incompatible cleaning solutions. "Isn't losing Dad enough of a change?" the narrator asks when her mother announces that the two of them will be moving from Connecticut to California. After bidding farewell to her beloved grandfather, Frank, Dulcie and her mother head west in her father's 1968 Chevy pickup. When Dulcie's mother later decides to trade in the pick-up, the prospect of losing this remnant of her father is too much, and Dulcie drives it back to the home she cannot leave behind. She moves in with Frank, also a janitor, and spends the summer working with him and another student, Roxanne. Much of the novel's charm grows out of Dulcie's budding friendship with Roxanne, who is coping with an abusive mother, and the humor bandied about between the two girls and Frank. Dulcie's narrative realistically mixes joy and pain in reminiscences about her father and her solo cross-country journey, which included visits to the Kansas Fainting Goat Farm and the Shrine of Holy Relics in Ohio. Reflecting on her Ohio stop, Dulcie muses that her father's truck, the dictionaries he gave to her, and her grandfather's kitchen table "were my own relics-pieces and fragments of places and people that I could hold and remember." A carefully crafted, impressive debut. Ages 10-up. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Dulcie's dad and grandfather were the school janitors in her Connecticut town, until her dad died in a chemical accident. Suddenly her mom decides to move and takes Dulcie to California. Wanting desperately not to leave what she knows, Dulcie takes her father's truck that her mother was about to sell and drives back to her grandfather's, sending her mom postcards from odd destinations across the country. When she returns as her grandfather's unpaid assistant for the summer, she meets his new junior assistant, Roxanne, who loves cleaning and hates being at home for a reason that will reveal itself in order to make everything else work out. And that it does, though with a not-too-convincing ease. None of the characters quite resolve themselves into full-fledged people and there is a little too much storyline, but often the dialogue is very funny. As a newcomer, Acampora is one to watch. The girls are spunky but oddly genderless, and Grandpa Frank is too wise and too patient to be believed, but teens who want to think of themselves as capable of self-sufficiency will connect to Dulcie and her independent attitude. (Fiction. YA) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Gr. 7-10. I was a John Jacob Jerome High School janitor like my dad, Dulcie explains in her droll, up-front manner, referring to her after-school job. So far I'd lived to tell about it. Her father had not--dying suddenly after a freak encounter with toxic fumes. Now Dulcie's mother wants to escape their small Connecticut town, and whisks Dulcie away to California. Grieving for both her father and her old, comfortable life, the plucky teen borrows her mom's Chevy truck and drives back home to live and work with her grandfather, a janitor at the same school. During a transformative summer, she and her loving family--reconciled Mom included--rally to help another student janitor through a crisis of her own. Dulcie's deadpan wit, the quirky road-trip premise, and a cast of appealing adult and teen characters combine in this unusually strong first novel, which may remind some of Joan Bauer's Rules of the Road (1998). Despite an unfortunate cover image, which depicts a girl who appears much younger than Dulcie's 16 years, many YAs will connect to an outwardly tough character who can nonetheless admit that sometimes she feels very breakable. An affecting, engaging family story, uniquely told through the janitor's lens. --Anne O'Malley Copyright 2006 Booklist