Amy Jo Burns. (2014). Cinderland: A Memoir. Beacon Press.

Amy Jo Burns. 2014. Cinderland: A Memoir. Beacon Press.

Amy Jo Burns, Cinderland: A Memoir. Beacon Press, 2014.

Amy Jo Burns. Cinderland: A Memoir. Beacon Press, 2014.

OverDrive Product Record

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Cinderland

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1. • value: family
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19. • value: Medical
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21. • value: Sociology
22. • value: raising girls
23. • value: cognitive behavioral therapy
24. • value: unconditional parenting
25. • value: biographies and memoirs
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27. • value: raising boys
28. • value: history books
29. • value: mental health books
30. • value: psychology books
31. • value: biographies of famous people
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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Burns, Amy Jo
   • bioText: Amy Jo Burns teaches at the Arts Council of Princeton and writes for Ploughshares. She lives in Franklin Park, New Jersey. This is her first book.
   • name: Amy Jo Burns

publishDate

2014-10-07T00:00:00-04:00

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title

Cinderland

fullDescription

A riveting literary debut about the cost of keeping quiet

Amy Jo Burns grew up in Mercury, Pennsylvania, an industrial town humbled by the steel collapse of the 1980s. Instead of the construction booms and twelve-hour shifts her parents’ generation had known, the Mercury Amy Jo knew was marred by empty houses, old strip mines, and vacant lots. It wasn’t quite a ghost town—only because many people had no choice but to stay.
 
The year Burns turned ten, this sleepy town suddenly woke up. Howard Lotte, its beloved piano teacher, was accused of sexually assaulting his female students. Among the countless girls questioned, only seven came forward. For telling the truth, the town ostracized these girls and accused them of trying to smear a good man’s reputation. As for the remaining girls—well, they were smarter. They lied. Burns was one of them.
 
But such a lie has its own consequences. Against a backdrop of fire and steel, shame and redemption, Burns tells of the boys she ran from and toward, the friends she abandoned, and the endless performances she gave to please a town that never trusted girls in the first place.
 
This is the story of growing up in a town that both worshipped and sacrificed its youth—a town that believed being a good girl meant being a quiet one—and the long road Burns took toward forgiving her ten-year-old self. Cinderland is an elegy to that young girl’s innocence, as well as a praise song to the curative powers of breaking a long silence. 

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Library Journal, starred review
   • content: "The toll that Burns's silence took manifested in several forms, and she details them here in a thoughtfully written examination of what motivated her to keep silent while other victims spoke out"
2. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: "A haunting debut memoir about the price of keeping secrets... [S]lim, lyrically evocative."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Boston Globe
   • content: "[A] raw, painful memoir ... at its most compelling when Burns sketches the contours of her girlhood ... rendering them not quaint but stifling and ominous."
4. • premium: False
   • source: The Rumpus
   • content: "Burns' writing is deliciously dense and full of perfectly picked observations.... Cinderland is a powerful and captivating memoir."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Pittsburgh Quarterly
   • content: "With gentle, focused prose, [Burns] turns the confessional memoir genre upside down."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Star Tribune
   • content: "An expository reflection on how a place shapes our own sense of self."
7. • premium: False
   • source: The Kansas City Star
   • content: "A scorching memoir about a town divided."
8. • premium: False
   • source: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
   • content: "[Burns] has a way with words that allows her to make her sleepy town and the dilapidated Pittsburgh area of the 1990s glimmer. ... Her writing is affecting without being sensational, and the reader's heart is left aching at the end of each chapter."
9. • premium: False
   • source: The Star-Ledger
   • content: "Burns writes beautifully of coming of age in a rust belt town."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun
    • content: "Amy Jo Burns has written a humane and lapidary account of her Rust Belt childhood: the claustrophobia, the yearning for escape, the weight and consequence of secrets. I have never read a book that captures small-town American life so perfectly."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Roxane Gay, author of An Untamed State
    • content: "Amy Jo Burns's Cinderland is an exquisite achievement. From the first page to the last, I held my breath as Burns held my heart. She writes of small Rust Belt towns and the boys and girls who grow up and apart in those towns and the overwhelming need for escape and what happens when secrets no one should have to bear burn and burn. This book demands to be read."
12. • premium: False
    • source: Scott Cheshire, author of High as the Horses' Bridles
    • content: "Memoir of the highest order, Cinderland lovingly gives voice to a troubled community, small-town summers, young love and heartbreak, a scandal that tears a town apart, and the memory of a young girl who told a dangerous lie. Or did she? Amy Jo Burns writes like a dream, beyond her years, and this book is gripping, generous, and wise."
13. • premium: False
    • source: Meredith Hall, author Without a Map
    • content: "Amy Jo Burns delivers an unerring report from inside the universe of a teenaged girl struggling to escape the town she both loves and mistrusts. This is a place that insists on secrets held, and she is a good girl, holding hers tenaciously, at all costs."
14. • premium: False
    • source: Elliott Holt, author of You Are One of Them
    • content: "'I did not want to tell this story,' Amy Jo Burns confesses in Cinderland, but readers will be glad she did. This memoir is testament to the incinerating power of secrets and the steely resolve of survivors. But it's also an unforgettable portrait of a small Rust Belt town in decline, and in that sense it is a story about America, one of ruin and reinvention, of ashes and incandescence."
15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      August 15, 2014
      A haunting debut memoir about the price of keeping secrets in small-town, Rust Belt America. Mercury, Pennsylvania, had once been a thriving, vigorous city. But when Burns grew up there during the aftermath of "the Steel Apocalypse" that began in the late 1960s, life moved at a "barely detectable" pace. In 1991, the town suddenly emerged from its "waking sleep" to confront the shocking reality that a beloved piano teacher had been fondling his young female students. As a 10-year-old, Burns was one of the victims. Yet she chose to lie about the molestation because in Mercury, "a girl [couldn't] escape her reputation," and the seven girls who told the truth had faced devastating consequences. But silence had its own costs. Burns' capacity to love during adolescence became stunted by fear. She could not fully open her heart to a boy because her trust had been violated. Further, love also had the potential to root her to a town that she loved but desperately wanted to escape. Any relationships she did form were with "safe" boys, like those from her church or with those for whom love was a performance, much like the ones she gave on stage in high school drama productions. Her unquiet conscience never let her forget the fellow victims she had betrayed through her silence. In an ironic twist, Burns became one of seven homecoming princesses, girls as pure as new-made steel who had the love and approval of Mercury. But as she discovered, getting everything she wanted was "dirty business." Only by leaving that world built by coal and iron and now foundering in its own ashes could she begin her process of purification through the written word. A slim, lyrically evocative memoir.

      COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      September 1, 2014
      Burns grew up in the Rust Belt town of Mercury, Pennsylvania, and writes evocatively of familiar seasonal rituals, including summers at the swimming pool, football games, and local theater productions. Mercury has a problem, howevera piano teacher whose hands wander to his young female students. Burns is one of those who denied the allegations and steadfastly refused to admit what went on during her weekly lessons. Now, years later, she trains her literary eye with elegant precision on the town that induced her to enact that charade. With words of seminal grace and power, Burns writes artfully of the urge to leave home, teenage romance, and lost friendships. Shunning sensationalism, she instead immerses readers in images of a town mourning its broken promise of middle-class success and clinging to moments of past glory. It simply cannot bear another loss. Burns has clearly never been able to reconcile the lie her 10-year-old self so casually embraced, writing, Some will stay and wish they'd left. Others will leave and wish they'd stayed. I will always be looking back. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

popularity

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shortDescription

A riveting literary debut about the cost of keeping quiet

Amy Jo Burns grew up in Mercury, Pennsylvania, an industrial town humbled by the steel collapse of the 1980s. Instead of the construction booms and twelve-hour shifts her parents’ generation had known, the Mercury Amy Jo knew was marred by empty houses, old strip mines, and vacant lots. It wasn’t quite a ghost town—only because many people had no choice but to stay.
 
The year Burns turned ten, this sleepy town suddenly woke up. Howard Lotte, its beloved piano teacher, was accused of sexually assaulting his female students. Among the countless girls questioned, only seven came forward. For telling the truth, the town ostracized these girls and accused them of trying to smear a good man’s reputation. As for the remaining girls—well, they were smarter. They lied. Burns was one of them.
 
But such a lie has its own consequences. Against a backdrop...

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2. • code: PSY002000
   • description: Psychology / Developmental / Adolescent
3. • code: SOC060000
   • description: Social Science / Sexual Abuse & Harassment