Tae Kwon Do!

Nicknamed Zippy because she couldn't keep still as a baby, Haven Kimmel has written a childhood memoir of her first nine years growing up in Indiana. The book is not so much a narrative as a series of deceptively simple impressions. Here is small-town America (population an unwavering 300), with its day-to-day trivia documented in quirky, juvenile detail. Almost untouched by the culture of the swinging sixties, 'Mooreland was not so much behind the times as confused about the times'. The people of Mooreland only took two kinds of vacations, visiting relatives in Tennessee or camping, and the highlight of the calendar was the carnival that arrived at the end of the harvest season. Maintaining an enviable innocence and well protected from department store grottoes, Zippy still believed in Santa at age nine and worried about how he would extricate himself from their red-hot coal stove. In her descriptions of a social life that revolved around the Quaker church and farming, Kimmel depicts a closely knit society going its own eccentric way. The book bulges with larger-than-life characters, including Edythe, 'a nasty old bat' who tried to elicit sympathy by pretending to drink a whole bottle of iodine, and 'Doc Holliday' who operated the one drugstore, wore a bow tie and suspenders and offered medicine so old that it must have come out of the Ark. Zippy's own mother rarely left her couch. 'She had successfully ignored a quarter of a century of entropy and decay, had sat peacefully crunching popcorn and drinking soda while the house fell down around us.... Mother didn't get dressed for days at a time and would only sit in a corner of the couch reading science fiction and eating pork rinds.' Childhood memoirs are notoriously difficult to write convincingly as early experiences are filtered and coloured by adult analysis. Haven Kimmel succeeds to the extent that her parents never quite appear as fully rounded people but are portrayed in disconnected snippets so that we only begin to make sense of them in the gradual piecemeal fashion that the child does. The book is illustrated with small photos, giving the impression that it's a family album put into words. It's competently written and as homespun as The Waltons. (Kirkus UK)