From the Depths

The Girl in the Well is Me by Karen Rivers

How do I describe The Girl in the Well is Me by Karen Rivers? Where do I start?
This is unlike any other book that I have encountered. It's a tale of desperation, a saga of hurt and pain.  It's also filled with some of the most hilarious, laugh-out-loud prose I have ever read.
How does Rivers pull this off? How can she break my heart for one moment and then completely turn me around, leaving me spitting out my drink with uncontrolled laughter when I get to the next page. Can I really laugh at someone's inner dialogue and simultaneously empathize with her pain?
How does she do it? I have no idea.
But it works. It totally works.
The voice of Kammie Summer is like no other voice I have ever heard and one that I will never be able to erase from my mind and my heart.

Meet Kammie Summers, the new girl in town, who desperately yearns to leave behind the shame and hurt of her former life and move on. In her new school, she locates a trio of popular girls and bravely attempts to tag along.  Then things go terribly wrong. Kammie finds herself at the bottom. Literally rock bottom.
Her ongoing stream-of-consciousness monologue from the bottom of a well is filled with wisdom from the depths of a disparate soul.

Nine Truths from the Bottom of the Well

• Lies, lies, and more lies

​Lying turns your soul into something small and dry and hard, like an old raisin you find in your book bag squashed under a book you on-purpose-forgot to return to your old school library because you loved it too much to leave it behind.

• Mean girls

Mean is where they get their power. The thing with mean girls is that everyone knows that if you aren't one of them, they're going to destroy you, tiny bit by tiny bit. And I'm not going to lie, I've been destroyed enough for this year, for this whole life even.

• Diagramming sentences

Metaphors and similes make my head hurt, picking apart those sentences in Language Arts, making all those words fall away from their sentences and separating them into gerunds and modifiers and whatevers. It's like sentence massacres, those poor words bleeding sadly all over the page.

• School bus blues

I hate school buses with the heat of a thousand Texas suns.Everything bad that goes on at school goes on with a thousand times more intensity on a school bus. Trust me.

• Truth About Tears

Crying because you're sad is unstoppable; it just happens, even if you close your eyes, it leaks out of you. Sadness makes you holey, like a sieve, and nothing can be held in.

• Parent Trap

It occurs to me right at this exact moment that it's possible children could be raised by robots BETTER than by actual people...

• Holding onto the past

I need Grandma's Peachy Keen Cookie Recipe! How else will I bring Grandma back?
I am bringing peachy keen back, lovingly wrapping the words up and dropping them carefully into modern times like the past lobbing gifts into the future, through me.

• Left behind

We left a lot of things behind, but not enough. It turns out that you can't get away from yourself. The museum of you is inside you. 

• If it's broken ...

We all have broken parts, that's the truth, but mine really hurt.