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BREATHE MY NAME
R. A. Nelson
Razorbill/Penguin Young Readers Group
Fiction
ISBN: 9781595140944
320 pages
Fireless is a magical, terrible place. In Fireless, seven-year-old Shine and younger sisters Tan, Ninny and Suddle live in both awe and fear of their mother. Momma laughs and plays with them, but Shine also sees Momma intentionally cut her arms with thorns.
Fast forward 10 years. Shine now insists that people call her Frances. She’s a junior in high school, living a completely normal life with her mother, father and two younger brothers. She has a best friend, Ann Mirette, and a hot new boyfriend named Nix, who just moved to Alabama from Metairie, Louisiana. Despite all this, there are cracks in Frances’s normal life. The sound of an ambulance is enough to send her into a panic attack. She often has nightmares about suffocating. And then there’s the man with steel-colored hair who follows her around in a black Volkswagen Beetle.
What’s causing Frances’s nightmares? Who is the man in the Beetle? Encouraged by Nix’s honesty and humanitarian nature, she tells him, “My name isn’t Frances.”
Frances Robinson’s real name is Francine Jelks. She has been on national television, been called brave and had adoption offers from as far away as Egypt, all because of what Momma did in Fireless. When Francine was seven, Momma got up, served Francine and her sisters breakfast, then called them upstairs one by one, where she smothered them with a pillow. Francine survived because, as she was struggling to free herself from her mother and the pillow, a man came by to read the electric meter. Her sisters’ murders became national news, her mother was sent to prison and Francine was adopted by the Robinsons.
The man in the Beetle introduces himself to the family as R.C. Carruthers, a lawyer for Frances’s mother, Afton Jelks. Afton is about to be released from prison into a halfway house, where she can start to rebuild her life under close supervision. Mr. Carruthers gives Frances a sealed letter and tells her it’s from her mother. When Frances opens the five-page letter, she sees that four of the pages are blank, but the fifth bears the following message:
I need to see you. Please come right away.
We have to finish.
Against her parents’ wishes, Frances and Nix lie about going on a school trip and head to Tennessee to track down Afton Jelks. R. A. Nelson captures the slow, hot pace of Southern life while at the same time presenting a heart-pounding mystery with a twist at the end you’ll never see coming. The story moves between Frances’s mostly charmed life in Alabama and her weird, often frightening childhood in Tennessee. Frances knows her trip will be dangerous, but it is something she feels she must do; her adoptive parents have sheltered her and she wants to come to terms with her past, even if it destroys her.
--- Reviewed by Carlie Webber
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