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highly recommended |
good read 
just finished this book. i liked it very much. it was touching, funny, sad, tragic and a lot more. Well written. would recommend it.
Good memoir 
It's good, but it is rather slow. Most of the book consists of the author's family memoir. Very little is actually given to the murder. The biggest problem I had with it, is that the author's anger, at her mother, at the 50s, at the Catholic church, at the lack of services for autistic kids, at "the government," whatever, comes through loud and clear and continually. It's less like a book than like having your irate neighbor in to blow off steam at your kitchen table. Some people will probably like that about it. I felt that the author lost credibility there.
Loss of innocence
No one locked their doors. Few mothers drove cars. Kids walked to school, church, and the neighborhood grocery, and played under street lights at dusk. On the surface, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith's 1950's childhood was idyllic. But scratch that surface, and it quickly becomes apparent that nothing could be further from the truth. First, there was her remote mother, always on the verge of the then fashionable nervous breakdown. Then, her older brother, a manipulative, tyrannical child who never received an education or treatment because no one knew quite what was wrong with him. Mary Ann's first ten years were spent doing normal childhood activities but walking on eggshells and suppressing her own needs at home. Her description of American culture in that post war era are priceless, and she does it with humor, touches of sarcasm, and dead-on accuracy.
Then, all at once. on the day of the 5th grade field trip to the electric company, a classmate of Mary-Ann is brutally murdered by a pedophile. True to the times, no one discusses the tragedy, and the kids are left to wonder about every facet of that terrifying crime. And to cope with its psychological consequences entirely on their own.
Ms Tirone Smith wrote this memoir as a memorial to her friend, having summoned the courage to face the grief and the issues she had buried for decades. She traces the course of the apprehension, trial, and punishment of the killer in clinical detail. And she has succeeded nobly, writing with grace and distinction. Readers of Girls of Tender Age will long remember theheartbreaking story of little Irene with the "Loretta Young eyes."
Very interesting 
I had a hard time putting this book down. I was sorry when the book ended. Mary-Ann developed all the people in her book very well that you felt by reading it they were part of your own family..and if not family member someone that that you knew a lot about. I thought this book was very good on many levels. Thank you for writing such a powerful memoir. Barb :)
Girls of Tender Age
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Even though it was a very sad but true story it was choreographed perfectly. I couldn't put it down. Having grown up in Hartford, Ct. I was very familiar with the setting of the book. It enabled me to really place myself in their footsteps and know the surroundings, without trying to create a picture them in my mind.
reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
"In Girls of Tender Age, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith fully articulates with great humor and tenderness the wild jubilance of an extended French-Italian family struggling to survive in a post-World War II housing project in Hartford, Connecticut. Smith seamlessly combines a memoir whose intimacy matches that of Angela's Ashes with the tale of a community plagued by a malevolent predator that holds the emotional and cultural resonance of The Lovely Bones. Smith's Hartford neighborhood is small-town America, where everyone's door is unlocked and the school, church, library, drugstore, 5 & 10, grocery, and tavern are all within walking distance. Her family is peopled with memorable characters -- her possibly psychic mother who's always on the verge of a nervous breakdown, her adoring father who makes sure she has something to eat in the morning beyond her usual gulp of Hershey's syrup, her grandfather who teaches her to bash in the heads of the eels they catch on Long Island Sound, Uncle Guido who makes the annual bagna cauda, and the numerous aunts and cousins who parade through her life with love and food and endless stories of the old days. And then there's her brother, Tyler. Smith's household was "different." Little Mary-Ann couldn't have friends over because her older brother, Tyler, an autistic before anyone knew what that meant, was unable to bear noise of any kind. To him, the sound of crying, laughing, phones ringing, or toilets flushing was "a cloud of barbed needles" flying into his face. Subject to such an assault, he would substitute that pain with another: he'd try to chew his arm off. Tyler was Mary-Ann's real-life Boo Radley, albeit one whose bookshelves sagged under the weight of the World War II books he collected and read obsessively. Hanging over this rough-and-tumble American childhood is the sinister shadow of an approaching serial killer. The menacing Bob Malm lurks throughout this joyous and chaotic family portrait, and the havoc he unleashes when the paths of innocence and evil cross one early December evening in 1953 forever alters the landscape of Smith's childhood. Girls of Tender Age is one of those books that will forever change its readers because of its beauty and power and remarkable wit. "
girls of tender, age, girls, tender
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based on 45 reviews
