A Girl Named Zippy
Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana

By Haven Kimmel
Doubleday, $21.95
ISBN 0385499825

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Mooreland, Indiana, Haven Kimmel's hometown, had around 300 residents when she was born in 1965. Her father nicknamed her "Zippy" because of the way she zipped around, and although Kimmel did not speak until the age of three, she continually observed and took in the world around her. Hers was the world of the small-town Midwest, a place that seemed very simple and very complicated at the same time.

Many of the anecdotes in A Girl Named Zippy resonate within the tradition of American memoir, focusing on Kimmel's loved ones. Readers learn about her family, including her "best cat," PeeDink. Neighbors play a large role as well, and number among them an older lady who wears the same dress for 23 days by Zippy's count and scares her because, as she tells her friend Julie, "'My sister says she eats a stew made out of puppies."

Each chapter is prefaced with a photograph, and these images add to the depth of depiction within the text. Kimmel's inclusion of writing from her own baby book also serves to illuminate her childhood. Her mother, concerned about her toddler daughter's baldness, wrote, "Now that we know she can talk, all I can say is: dear God. Please give that child some hair. Amen." These interspersed moments allow the characters -- Zippy's own family -- to speak for themselves on occasion, giving this memoir a fullness not always found in personal recollections.

Two of Kimmel's most stirring chapters are actually lists enumerating things her father lost and won by gambling: hunting beagles, some money and a stuffed monkey that became Zippy's "most beloved toy."

Readers of A Girl Named Zippy will long remember these details, which give the book its special tone -- at times hilariously zany, but with an almost haunting resonance. Kimmel's unflinching portrait of her childhood, not always halcyon but laced with moments of pure joy, represents a fresh look at the Midwest as well as the memoir.

Eliza R. L. McGraw writes from Cabin John, Maryland.