Anyway, Regan brings his nephew, Dan Mangan, to live with Mr. Maypenny. Dan got in with a bad gang in New York and Regan's hoping having a real home will help the boy mend his ways. Dan gets off on the wrong foot with Trixie, who's convinced he's a liar and a thief. Of course it's all a big misunderstanding and Dan rescues Bobby, who was somehow wandering around the Wheeler's game preserve during a storm looking for a catamount and fell down a hole and got his leg pinned by a rock. No doubt Trixie was supposed to be babysitting.
I read a few reviews for Jenny Manzer's new YA title, "Save Me, Kurt Cobain" a few months ago. It sounded like an interesting premise: The year is 2006, and fifteen year old Nico lives with her dad Verne in Victoria, Canada. Her mom disappeared eleven years earlier and Nico doesn't know a whole lot about her. She finds a box of her mother's things, and inside are some CDs. It turns out Nico and her mom liked a lot of the same bands, including Nirvana. Nico finds photos of her mom at two Nirvana concerts in March of 1991, before they got famous, and one of her mom's CDs looks like it's been autographed by Kurt Cobain. She also finds a letter her mom wrote him but never sent, wishing she'd been able to follow the band on the rest of their tour.
Nico goes to visit her aunt in Seattle over the Christmas holiday, and on the ferry ride home she spots a slight, blond man with electric blue eyes and is convinced it's Kurt Cobain. She follows him off the ferry, hides out in his car, and ends up at his remote cabin. The man tells her his name is Daniel and he's a writer, he writes under a pseudonym and eschews fame. She tells him about her mom disappearing, he tells her wistfully about his daughter he gets to see "sometimes", and a less than forgiving ex-wife. Nico is convinced not only is Daniel really Kurt, but he's also her real father.
I'm still not sure how I felt about this book. I was glad Manzer mentioned that there are people who disagree with the suicide story, and she didn't make it out like we're all nutballs, which is nice. She also got some major things wrong, though, which, yes, I know it's fiction, but when Nico is purportedly telling factual things about Kurt Cobain that are just wrong, it made me crazy. His uncles never committed suicide, she mentions quotes from the "suicide" note which are not actually in the note, but were read by his widow and purported to be in the note. Thanks to Tom Grant we have access to the actual note, so we know he didn't say that. She also called "Incesticide" a sort of "greatest hits" compilation, which it was not, it was mostly demos and outtakes the record company put out to cash in on the overnight success of "Nevermind". I did like how cleverly she inserted Nirvana lyrics, I think I caught them all. It's a lovely thought, that he faked his own death to get away from it all and is currently living in a remote cabin writing books, but of course that's all it is: fiction. It was also hard (and made me realize how old I am) to hear Nirvana described by teenagers as a band their parents liked.
Sigh.
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