Sara K Joiner: Review of "The Warden's Daughter"

The Warden's Daughter by Jerry Spinelli tells the story of Cammie O'Reilly, the titular daughter of the warden. She lives in an apartment above a prison in Pennsylvania in 1959. While she has a good life and enjoys a certain notoriety as the warden's daughter, she has one goal for the summer--to find a new mother.

Her own mother died in an act of sacrifice that saved Cammie when she was only a baby but resulted in her mother being struck and killed by a truck. Cammie knows the story, but she is haunted by it. She refuses to ride her bike near the intersection where the accident happened, which she dubs The Corner.

To find a new mother, Cammie focuses on some of the women in the prison--in particular their trustee housekeeper Eloda, and Boo Boo, a shoplifter. Ultimately, Cammie wants someone to mother her; she's not truly looking for her father to marry this person. She wants to feel the unconditional love from someone that she knows her real mother felt for her. But she doesn't remember what that feeling is like.

Now that Cammie is twelve going on thirteen, life is becoming increasingly difficult. Her best friend is trying out lipstick and hoping to be on American Bandstand. Other girls in the neighborhood want to hang out in the prison yard (without the prisoners) and exploit their relationship with Cammie. The boys she plays pick-up baseball games with have found her ruthless way of playing too much to handle and kick her off the field.

Cammie is an angry child, and she's not always pleasant to be around. Even she knows she's unhappy. Losing a parent is never easy, and Cammie's loss is amplified by losing hers in such a manner. How can you ever come to terms with the death of someone who is, by her last act, a hero?

She turns that anger outward and tries to generate feelings from Eloda by picking fights with her. She smokes a cigarette in front of her. She calls her the maid. Nothing seems to work.

It's not until Cammie reaches her own psychological breaking point and begins to heal that she fully understands her relationship with Eloda.

While I found the ending a bit rushed, everything up to that point was a delight. Cammie is an angry girl, but books with characters like her--simmering with barely controlled hostility to anyone--is such a rarity in books for young readers that she was a breath of fresh air. Especially since she was a girl.

Having lost a parent when I was a child (not as young as Cammie), I understood that hurt and that anger and that desire to lash out at anyone who seemed like their life was so much better than yours. Hindsight gives us all regrets, and Cammie has her own by the end of the book. She grows and matures and finds a well of strength inside herself that helps her come to terms with her mother's death.

The ending only feels a bit rushed because we've spent so much time with Cammie in her everyday life in the summer of 1959 that jumping forward a couple years is a bit disconcerting.

So much rage is in a story that seems almost old-fashioned. Cammie rides her bike around a picturesque American town. She befriends a number of interesting and quirky characters. But underneath all that old-fashioned charm is a deeply unhappy female protagonist who is utterly real and human.

I highly recommend The Warden's Daughter.

Sara K Joiner is the author of After the Ashes. She is also a public librarian.