Max and Menna by Shauna Kelley
2010 Book of the Year Award (Foreword Magazine), Young Adult Fiction Finalist!
"The protection of parents for the first few decades of life is all too often taken for granted. Max and Menna tells the story of two lost children who only have each other for support. Abandoned and lost, Max and Menna struggle to survive and learn more than the value of companionship even in self-reliance. Max and Menna a charming and riveting read, recommended." Midwest Book Review, Small Press Bookwatch: January 2011
"A haunting tale: the story unfolds as seamlessly as a memory, but winds like a complicated, aching, longing dream. Its grasp leaves a mark, the kind you've been left by Faulkner, Peter Taylor, and Alice Sebold, from the repeated flares of perfect written moments within the steady flame of a solid narrative." Meri Robie-Craven, author of What Happened to the Miracle
"Max and Menna is a heart-felt, heart-rending story of abandoned children who must learn, as best they can, to care for each oher and themselves." Madison Smartt Bell, the author of twelve novels including All Soul's Rising, a National Book Award and PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the Anisfield-Wolf award for the best book of 1996 dealing with matters of race.
MAX AND MENNA tells the story of two siblings surviving a deplorable home life in the South in the early 1980s. Telling the story from each of their viewpoints, Max and Menna outline their reliance on each other and on Nick, their only friend, as they cope with growing up in poverty, living with an alcoholic mother, and having no indication of the other half of their parentage.
The story opens with Max and Menna in the eighth grade. They meet Nick, a Native American, and the story continues to take place during their summer vacations progressively through high school.
Max, quiet and introspective, struggles to understand how to be the only man in the house and protect a family that seems determined to destroy itself. Menna is quick-tempered and vivacious, and grows to love and view Nick as a method of coping with a childhood that requires her to be very adult.
Despite the strength of the bond the three of them share, however, their environment works against them. As the children of the town drunk, the younger siblings of the town slut, and the friends of an Indian from “over the fence,” Max and Menna fight not only to grow up, and get out, but to stay together, and stay safe.
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"THE NEW JACOB AND BELLA: For all you 'Twilight' fans pining over Jacob Black and still waiting in vain for the installment in which Jacob and Bella do hook up, meet 'Max and Menna.' While Max and Menna are fraternal twins born in a small town in a family without a single hope, the unlikely friendships they forge teach them about things their home life does not: love, acceptance, loyalty and sacrifice. The first novel by friend and debut novelist Shauna Kelley, 'Max and Menna' is a melancholic coming-of-age story about beating the odds and breaking free from the cycle of generational influence and rural mores that has all the shadow and mystery of Twilight sans the supernatural forces.
"...as the relationship between Max and Menna starts to unfold into a gentle cadence between past and present, Max and Menna quickly developed into the story of me or the story of countless other latchkey-like friends who, growing up, were the product of broken homes, abuse or distracted, derelict parents. We all had a place like the Hill, whether real or imagined, and, like Max and Menna, while there, we rarely spoke of why we fled to it as if doing so would diminish its sanctuary.
"Similar to Jeanette Walls' 'A Glass Castle,' Kelley aptly captures the void one feels -- even into adulthood -- that results from dysfunction and abandonment. The way the weight of its emptiness latches to the soul like a dense, torrid humidity. This underlying emotion -- clingy desperation, perpetual inadequacy and permanent entrapment--may be lost to readers unfamiliar with nuances of childhood riddled with alcoholism and abuse. These depressive states are easily vanquished by the feverish intensity between Nick and Menna -- the new Jacob and Bella -- and, even amid tragedy, the unbreakable bond of friends." Heather Walls
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Shauna Kelley works in the marketing department of a non-fiction publisher and has been in the publishing business for more than five years. Previous writing credits include a regular column for “The Inditer,” and a National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts Award for the short fiction version of Max and Menna. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Kelley says of Max and Menna, “This is a story that has been with me for a long time, but I hadn’t, until quite recently, lived enough to begin to do it justice. I relied on the excellent example of my writing heroes—Margaret Atwood, Sherman Alexie, and John Irving—and hope I have constructed a book that will appeal to women and young adults and help them learn about the human capacity for overcoming unbearable situations. This is a lesson that I have only just begun to understand.”
Visit Shauna Kelley's blog
Hardcover with jacket: ISBN: 978-0-9844627-3-5 Retail: $ 26.00 USD
Paperback: ISBN: 978-0-9844627-4-2 Retail: $ 14.95 USD
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5, 208 pgs Library of Congress Number: 2010925471
FICTION / Coming of Age FICTION / General Fiction
JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / Prejudice & Racism Ages 15 and up.
JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / Physical & Emotional Abuse
JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / Drugs, Alcohol, Substance Abuse
