Land of a Hundred Wonders

Land of a Hundred Wonders
by Lesley Kagen

LAND OF A HUNDRED WONDERS by

Lesley Kagen

Category:

Contemporary

Age Recommendation:

Grades 9+

Release Date: 8/5/08

Publisher: NAL

Reviewed by:

Cat

Rating:

5 Stars

Though she survived the wreckage that took her parents lives one rainy summer night, that near-fatal car accident

left Gibby

McGraw N(ot).Q(uite).R(ight).

While she spends her mornings working at Grandpa Charlie's Top o'the Morning Diner, her afternoons visiting the

residents

of Cray Ridge, Kentucky, running errands while Grandpa fishes, and gathering information to put in the

stories she writes

for Gibby's Gazette, Gibby also realizes everyone in town thinks she's diminished. Heck, even

Sheriff LeRoy Johnson called

her "dumber than anthracite" when he thought she was out of hearing range; but

Gibby has a plan.

At the top of her list of VERY IMPORTANT THINGS TO DO is to prove she is Quite Right and can take care

of herself

so Mama can rest in peace and Charlie will get off her back and stop sending her to talk with Reverend

Jack every time

she says or does something "inappropriate."

And the perfect plan fell into her lap when she found

Buster Malloy's murdered body

the man with plans to be the

future state governor, washed up on the shores of Browntown

Now all Gibby need

do is employ the skills learned

from THE

IMPORTANCE OF PERCEPTION IN METICULOUS INVESTIGATION by Howard Redmond

of New York City,

New York

to find Buster's killer and write the article for her paper.

What Gibby didn't count on was all hell breaking loose in the meantime.

I'm a huge fan of novels set in small towns; it's a prime opportunity for authors to utilize the family dynamic on a

much larger

scale and populate their world with plenty of quirky, compelling characters. Cray Ridge, Kentucky

lousy with those folks,

and I mean that in the best way possible.

Gibby's the protagonist and we experience the novel via her first

person narrative,

but all the characters were

spectacular. Lesley Kagen had me laughing at Gibby's inappropriate outbursts and downright

embarrassing

questions until my sides hurt, and she had me stemming the flow of tears at certain points throughout while

demonstrating just how much Gibby had lost due to the brain damage.

There's so much more regarding friend and familial connections, secrets and betrayals, but I fear going further into

detail will

lead to spoilers. All I can say is the roots of the characters' relationships run deep and when that

happens, there is a great

deal of twisting and rot that must eventually be unraveled.

A second, but equally important aspect in this novel is its social context. Ms. Kagen set LAND OF

HUNDRED

WONDERS

in the post

Civil Rights Movement south. As anyone who

has

ever spent time in the United States

southern

regions, there are places one can visit today in 2009, and still feel as though the events of that era never

took place. Ms.

Kagen does a superior job portraying the segregation that still existed in small places like Cray

Ridge, not to mention the

abuse of power employed by white law enforcement, and the simmering tensions

between the former and those forced to

live in the deteriorating conditions of Browntown.

We also see the toll Vietnam took on American soldiers sent overseas in Gibby's friend Billy Brown Junior. The

only son

of the town's richest man, he spends the days since his return in the woods, often times believing he's still

in the jungles of

the Orient, with his own hideout shelters all over town.

LAND OF A HUNDRED WONDERS is a complex, hilarious, tender, slice-of-life, love story, murder mystery all

rolled

into one package. I *loved* reading this novel. Picking it up and opening the pages was like settling in for a

visit with a

group of close friends; and while the ending, like life, was somewhat bittersweet, it was an entirely

appropriate send off for

these characters I'd come to cherish.