Mary's Bookcase : Have a sneak-peek between the covers of Cinnamon Girl by Trish MacEnulty

Cinnamon Girl
By Trish MacEnulty

Publication Date: September 11th, 2023

Publisher: Livingston Press

Page Length: 311 Pages

Genre: Historical Young Adult

(but boomers love it, too)!

Winner of the Gold Medal in YA Fiction from The Historical Fiction Company!

When her beloved step-grandmother, a semi-retired opera singer, dies of cancer in 1970, 15-year-old Eli Burnes runs away with a draft-dodger, thinking she's on the road to adventure and romance. What she finds instead is a world of underground Weathermen, Black Power revolutionaries, snitches and shoot-first police.

Eventually Eli is rescued by her father, who turns out both more responsible and more revolutionary than she'd imagined. But when he gets in trouble with the law, she finds herself on the road again, searching for the allies who will help her learn how to save herself.

"The book is a fantastic read: fast-moving, full of smoothly woven historical detail and rich characterizations, all told in Eli's appealing voice." — Sarah Johnson, Reading the Past

Excerpt

As I lay in my bed night after night, I wondered what would happen to me when Mattie died. Since my dad now had two boys with Cleo, I wasn’t sure he wanted me. Whenever he came to visit us, he was always affectionate but I felt as if he were playing a role that he didn’t quite fit like happened sometimes in Mattie’s operas when Max, the fat postman with the amazing voice, had to play a handsome young lover.

The Christmas of 1969 Billy and Cleo had not come to visit us for Christmas because one of the kids was sick. Instead he had sent me a transistor radio and a letter explaining that late at night, radio waves bounced off the ionosphere, and I’d be able to hear radio stations from other parts of the country, including his in St. Louis. On those nights when I couldn’t sleep I would carefully move the dial up and down. Suddenly my dad’s deep voice would cut through the air, and it would sound as if he were sitting right there in the room with me.

“This is Bad Billy Burnes on KXOK, playing Top-40 hits and your requests,” he would growl. Then he’d play something by the Beatles, the Carpenters, or Diana Ross— not the kind of music that was ever played in the house on the hill. One night he played “Cinnamon Girl” by a band called Crazy Horse. He said, “I want to dedicate this song to a very special someone in my life. She owns my heart.” I thought it was sweet that he had dedicated a song to Cleo.

In my room on my antique dresser, I kept a “treasure box,” an old cigar box that I decorated in the fourth grade with rhinestones and paint. This box had things I thought I should keep forever: some silver spoons with a great-grandmother’s initials, a little gold cross Miz Johnny had given me, a pencil once owned by Wolfgang, an old daguerreotype of some ancestor from before the Civil War, a few of my favorite marbles from childhood and the only picture I had of my mother, Carmella. The photo was a black and white picture of her and my dad, standing by a long sleek car. I was not born when this picture was taken. My mother was not smiling. Her hair was dark and thick. I could not, of course, see the color of her eyes. I imagined they must be brown because I had brown eyes, and Billy’s were the bluest of blues. She was staring at the camera, a defiant look on her face, while my dad, still a teenager, stared at her. I always thought she was looking at the future, looking at me.

No one ever spoke about my mother. I knew that she wasn’t from Augusta and she had no family here. Her mother, I think, was Cuban or Puerto Rican, which is how she wound up with a Spanish name and how I wound up with dark eyes. She’d been working at the National Golf Club as a waitress where my dad was a caddy. That’s how they met, and that’s all the information I could ever pry out of Miz Johnny.

The only other mention of my mother I could remember happened when I was around nine or ten at one of Mattie’s parties. I had fallen asleep under the piano but I woke up and heard the adults talking. They were asking Mattie why I had a black eye.

“She got in a fight with a boy at school who said her mother was a you-know-what-loving whore.” I heard a gasp. The boy, Marvin, came from a KKK family and the word he had said was one I was never allowed to say. I wasn’t sure what the other word, “whore,” meant, but I beat his ass anyway. He got in one good lick before I creamed him. Fighting is childish, I know, but I allowed myself the satisfaction of seeing tears dribbling down his face. When I’d come home and told them what had happened, Miz Johnny got really quiet, and Mattie sent me upstairs to take a bath.

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Trish MacEnulty

Trish MacEnulty is the author of a historical novel series, literary novels, memoirs, a short story collection, children’s plays, and most recently, the historical coming-of-age novel, Cinnamon Girl (Livingston Press, Sept. 2023). She has a Ph.D. in English from the Florida State University and graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Florida. She currently writes book reviews and features for the Historical Novel Society.

She lives in Florida with her husband Joe and her two tubby critters, Franco and Tumbleweed. More info at her website: trishmacenulty.com.

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