Resumen
A riveting literary debut about the cost of keeping quiet
Amy Jo Burns grew up in Mercury, Pennsylvania, an industrial town humbled by the steel collapse of the 1980s. Instead of the construction booms and twelve-hour shifts her parents' generation had known, the Mercury Amy Jo knew was marred by empty houses, old strip mines , and vacant lots. It wasn't quite a ghost town--only because many people had no choice but to stay.
The year Burns turned ten, this sleepy town suddenly woke up. Howard Lotte, its beloved piano teacher, was accused of sexually assaulting his female students. Among the countless girls questioned, only seven came forward. For telling the truth, the town ostracized these girls and accused them of trying to smear a good man's reputation. As for the remaining girls--well, they were smarter. They lied. Burns was one of them.
But such a lie has its own consequences. Against a backdrop of fire and steel, shame and redemption, Burns tells of the boys she ran from and toward, the friends she abandoned, and the endless performances she gave to please a town that never trusted girls in the first place.
This is the story of growing up in a town that both worshipped and sacrificed its youth--a town that believed being a good girl meant being a quiet one--and the long road Burns took toward forgiving her ten-year-old self. Cinderland is an elegy to that young girl's innocence, as well as a praise song to the curative powers of breaking a long silence.
Kirkus Review
A haunting debut memoir about the price of keeping secrets in small-town, Rust Belt America. Mercury, Pennsylvania, had once been a thriving, vigorous city. But when Burns grew up there during the aftermath of "the Steel Apocalypse" that began in the late 1960s, life moved at a "barely detectable" pace. In 1991, the town suddenly emerged from its "waking sleep" to confront the shocking reality that a beloved piano teacher had been fondling his young female students. As a 10-year-old, Burns was one of the victims. Yet she chose to lie about the molestation because in Mercury, "a girl [couldn't] escape her reputation," and the seven girls who told the truth had faced devastating consequences. But silence had its own costs. Burns' capacity to love during adolescence became stunted by fear. She could not fully open her heart to a boy because her trust had been violated. Further, love also had the potential to root her to a town that she loved but desperately wanted to escape. Any relationships she did form were with "safe" boys, like those from her church or with those for whom love was a performance, much like the ones she gave on stage in high school drama productions. Her unquiet conscience never let her forget the fellow victims she had betrayed through her silence. In an ironic twist, Burns became one of seven homecoming princesses, girls as pure as new-made steel who had the love and approval of Mercury. But as she discovered, getting everything she wanted was "dirty business." Only by leaving that world built by coal and iron and now foundering in its own ashes could she begin her process of purification through the written word. A slim, lyrically evocative memoir. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Reseña de Booklist
Burns grew up in the Rust Belt town of Mercury, Pennsylvania, and writes evocatively of familiar seasonal rituals, including summers at the swimming pool, football games, and local theater productions. Mercury has a problem, however a piano teacher whose hands wander to his young female students. Burns is one of those who denied the allegations and steadfastly refused to admit what went on during her weekly lessons. Now, years later, she trains her literary eye with elegant precision on the town that induced her to enact that charade. With words of seminal grace and power, Burns writes artfully of the urge to leave home, teenage romance, and lost friendships. Shunning sensationalism, she instead immerses readers in images of a town mourning its broken promise of middle-class success and clinging to moments of past glory. It simply cannot bear another loss. Burns has clearly never been able to reconcile the lie her 10-year-old self so casually embraced, writing, Some will stay and wish they'd left. Others will leave and wish they'd stayed. I will always be looking back. --Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2014 Booklist
Extractos
Prologue By the time the police entered our houses uninvited throughout the fall of 1991, our mothers had already commanded each of us to tell the truth about Howard Lotte, and we'd already decided to lie. It was too impossible for anyone to conceive, even those of us who had sat with Mr. Lotte and his feckless hands through seasons of weeknight piano lessons, that such a man could commit something so unholy, even if he was a little bit fat. Everyone in Mercury knew which girls had already snitched. We saw what it had cost them. The best hope for the rest of us, we thought then, was to remain anonymous until winter arrived and all the talk turned to idle chatter before it disappeared altogether. But the gossip about Mr. Lotte would not be squelched, and so the police launched a formal investigation to put the rumors to rest. Making a uniform circuit around town, the squad stopped at the homes of each of Mr. Lotte's peach-faced, preteen protégés. Some of the homes were split level and some were Victorian, but none of them were trailers. Mr. Lotte didn't seem to take on those kinds of girls. Anyone who was anyone took lessons from Mr. Lotte--if you were female, of course. When each of our turns came to be questioned, the lies spilled out so easily we suspected they'd been planted long ago. There were few girls--seven, to be exact--bold enough to tell the truth, but their soft voiced protests were almost drowned out by those of us unable to defy a town rallying behind one of its own. Though we were just ten, eleven, twelve years old, it became quite clear that men like Mr. Lotte secured a kind of protection that girls like us never could. The police supplied the questions, and we offered the answers we thought they wanted to hear. Like a swooping she-owl, our voices raised into an echoing chorus as mothers drew the shades for the night and the distant five o'clock bell signaled a shift change at the mill. Did he put his hands on you? No, Officer. No, he didn't. No no no no no. The sound found its way to the woods by the edge of the school yard where an old basketball hoop had been torn from the ground and laid prone some time ago, the same spot where lovesick boys dared to press their burning palms against a girl's. Then the sound moved toward the courthouse at the center of town where Mr. Lotte wouldn't get the opportunity to appear before a jury of his peers. Our voices only weakened once they reached Mercury's city limits, where the highway cut us off from the rest of the world. Now the town itself haunts us more than Mr. Lotte, even more than our own lies. It seems a story like this couldn't happen anywhere but Mercury, a place that had become its own needy planet, a town we loved for its empty houses, abandoned buildings, and vacant lots. The people of Mercury liked their trucks, their Iron City beer, and the stench of burning leaves. They knew how to work with their hands--how to sew a quilt, how to fix a carburetor, how to patch a roof. They knew how to wait out a tough winter. Together we all lived in the afterlife of a city that was once a titan. A very long time ago, Andrew Carnegie evangelized the steel gospel. He followed a simple formula: Contain the coal. Set it on fire. Strip away the impurities. Dispose of the slag. This was how a legion of unstoppable steel rods was sired. But then came the Steel Apocalypse, and Pittsburgh's satellite cities didn't all become ghost towns only because many people had no choice but to stay. Instead, the loss of our lifeblood slowed everything to a pace that was barely detectable, and the era of waking sleep began. Workers who used to pull twelve-hour shifts in the mill at Cooper Bessemer Steel in the next town over now had nowhere to go. The roads once clogged with commuters became open highways. Mostly, people just sat. And the children, of whom we were some, watched. We remember now how people around town used to float through the amniotic air. Pumping gas. Ordering pizza. Waiting in line at the drive-through ATM. Pushing the shopping cart through the dog food aisle at Rip's Sunrise Market. Taking long pauses in the middle of sentences. Not bothering to finish them. They used to think nothing could surprise them any more until Mr. Lotte proved them wrong. He proved us all wrong. Who are we? We are the girls who lied about Mr. Lotte when others told the truth and most of Mercury hated them for it. We performed for a fickle crowd and lost ourselves in the charade. From the moment we chose to protect a criminal, we also chose to forget everything that had happened. It was our best chance for survival. Even so, our lives were never the same. Our town was never the same. Our memories threaten to make a scandal of us, so we keep them to ourselves. We still remain in disguise (even from each other), but there's one thing we know. Our Sunday school teachers had always taught us that an honest answer was like a kiss on the lips, and we were not the kissing kind. Excerpted from Cinderland: A Memoir by Amy Jo Burns All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
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