Icy Sparks (Oprah's Book Club) (Oprah's Book Club)
by Gwyn Hyman Rubio

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Book Reviews of Icy Sparks (Oprah's Book Club) (Oprah's Book Club)

Book Review: A good first novel well worth reading
Summary: 4 Stars

That customer gives himself (or herself) away as a small-time, limited reader by remarking against "the idea that a child of 10 years old could have such mature thoughts." In the first place, such a reader probably never encountered Huck Finn, who could have such mature thoughts at the age of 14, or Jo, who could have such mature thoughts in LITTLE WOMEN. In the second place, that reader fails to notice that the book is written by Icy Sparks as a grown-up, looking back on her early years.

ICY SPARKS tells the story of how an orphaned girl in the Kentucky mountains comes to grips with a terrible affliction, the "cussing disease," that years later she will identify as Tourette's Syn! drome. Her behavior mystifies her community and causes her great humiliation, particularly among her classmates, who call her the "Frog Child."

But her condition of being an outcast, which leads eventually to incarceration in a children's asylum, should be understood as a metaphor for the condition of anyone who is a loner, a misfit, a stranger to "conventional" society.

How she learns to live with her condition, and how she triumphs over it, makes a compelling story that will entertain and instruct any reader...except the sort of misguided soul who wrote the following unfortunate words:

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