Middle Grade Monday and Arc Review: Stealing Mt. Rushmore by Daphne Kalmar

Image: Macmillan

Stealing Mt. Rushmore by Daphne Kalmar. 248 p. Feiwel and Friends/ Macmillan Publishing, August 18, 2020. 9781250155009. (Review of arc courtesy of Blue Slip Media.)

Middle Grade Monday wishes a happy book birthday next week to Stealing Mt. Rushmore by Daphne Kalmar. This story is set in 1974 in Somerville, Massachusetts and is narrated by thirteen-year-old Nellie Sanders, the girl who threw a monkey wrench into her father's plan to have four sons named George, Tom, Teddy and Abe, after the presidents carved into Mt. Rushmore. It's summertime, Nixon will most likely be impeached and her mother has recently abandoned the family. When her father discovers that she also stole the $500 he had been scrimping and saving to take the family to Mount Rushmore, he crawls into bed and stays there. Nellie knows what this means. It has happened before and it's scary. It leaves her to cook and clean and care for her two younger brothers. She thinks that taking that trip will help heal the family and so she and her younger brothers find ways to earn money. Her older brother has his own job and wants very little to do with his father or his siblings. 

This depiction of a dysfunctional, working class family in the 70s was so exquisitely and painfully on point there were times I needed to put the book down for relief and other times I needed to rush through reading it - like pulling off a bandaid. Sometimes tween narrators sound too grown up in middle grade fiction. Not so here. Nellie's voice was believable. Yes, she was a bit mature beyond her years but she was still so much a little girl who needed her mother no matter how despicable and negligent. This mom, oh man. I haven't felt this much enmity for a literary parent since Ada's Mam in The War That Saved My Life. 

While this story is decidedly sad, there is so much to love here starting with Nellie. She's appealing and resilient. Her relationship with both her younger brothers was so sweet. She's having the usually friendship difficulties but they work things out. The Somerville/ Boston/ Cambridge setting complete with Teddy's obsession with the Swan boats in the duck pond in the Boston Common is unique, as was Nellie's dad's obsession with Mt. Rushmore. Nellie's dad was a complicated character. He was a Vietnam Veteran, history buff and Nixon supporter who worked as a short order cook and tried his best to provide for his family.

Stealing Mt. Rushmore is the perfect book to hand to your readers who can't get enough sadness in their reading.