A series of five stories, loosely based on the author's experiences growing up on the edge of a small, industrial town in Illinois in the 1950s, touches upon such diverse topics as race relations, unwanted cats, confirmation in the Episcopal faith, and homosexuality. 15,000 first printing. Grade 7-10–Claire is the central figure here, narrating five stories set in northern Illinois in the 1950s. All of the selections explore complex issues, including racism, spirituality, sexual attraction, and the true motivations behind our actions. Written from the perspective of an adult looking back on childhood, the stories have the feel of a memoir. This perspective allows for elegant prose and mature reasoning on personal and societal ills, but loses the immediacy that a younger narrator would have provided. The content is not for the timid, as it includes a variety of potentially unsettling scenes. The title, for example, is not a humorous exaggeration but a literal description of how Mom handles a difficult family pet. Perhaps the biggest difficulty is to determine an audience. Most readers mature enough to handle the explicitly sexual theme of the final story will never get past the two-girls-playing-with-dolls opening story. Thought-provoking and beautifully literary nonetheless, this is for large collections and those special readers.– Faith Brautigam, Gail Borden Public Library, Elgin, IL Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. In an afterword to these five linked stories, Newbery Honor Book author Bauer writes that "each [one] begins with some deep truth of my own experience." The resulting collection has the tone of a memoir, despite its classification as fiction. Spanning the 1950s adolescence of its invented protagonist, Claire, the unusually large swath of time covered by the stories creates problems in defining the overall audience; the first entry--which delivers a simplistic message about racism--seems particularly out of step with the remaining selections. These dig deeper, encompassing betrayals by imperfect grown-ups (including one who poisons the cat in the disturbing title story) and stirrings of homosexual love, most directly explored in the strong finale, in which the platonic attentions of a beloved teacher trigger inexplicable sensations: "not the pounding of my heart, but that other deeper, more disturbing pounding." If YAs can push past the incongruous opener, they'll find a sympathetic character in Claire, whose inability to acknowledge her heart's truth will resonate with questioning teens. Jennifer Mattson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Marion Dane Bauer is an award-winning author who also teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults program at Vermont College. Among her Clarion titles are ON MY HONOR, a Newbery Honor Book; A BEAR NAMED TROUBLE; and RUNT: THE STORY OF A WOLF PUP. She lives with her partner, Ann Goddard, in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.