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**“The tomboy narrator of this funny, sad, ultimately disturbing novel is wise and compassionate beyond her years, like Scout in *To Kill a Mockingbird*. And she’s as cynical as *The Catcher in the Rye*’s Holden Caulfield. But Maggie is very much her own person―all six of them.” ―Carol Peace, *People*** Being the daughter of the owner of a successful candy factory and living in a house with its own beach, Maggie should be living a sweet life. But after an explosive incident at school with her teacher, this spirited, funny, and troubled adolescent is just trying to make it through a long summer at home―while feeling a long hidden secret make its way to the surface. ### From Publishers Weekly Already published in Great Britain, this often harrowing first novel by an American has been compared to Catcher in the Rye , most likely because narrator Maggie Pittsfield, 12 years old in the early '60s, shares Holden Caulfield's extraordinary discomfort with adult society--and his equally extraordinary ease in expressing it. But Maggie is angrier and in even greater pain than is Salinger's character, and her tale more particular. Although her affluent family tells her that she is the "luckiest girl in North Bay," she's experienced so much trauma that she claims six different personalities ("It wasn't craziness-- The Six Faces of Maggie or anything like that--I didn't black out and then wake up dancing naked on a pool table. . . I was perfectly aware of all the parts and I knew when they were going to take over: there just wasn't anything I could do about it"), and most of them are unforgiving. Readers familiar with such pop presentations of child abuse as the TV film Sybil will easily spot the clues to Maggie's distressing secrets; the challenge in this book is not to anticipate the narrator's revelations but to appreciate the completeness of her voice. Stowe never soft pedals Maggie, and the reader's uneasiness with this sharp character paradoxically testifies to the integrity of her achievement. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. ### From Library Journal The first-person narrative of this admirable literary debut comically reveals 12-year-old Maggie Pittsfield's secret, painful struggle with having been sexually abused. A reader having to deal otherwise with Maggie's victimization, her rage, her sometimes violent tendencies, and her six distinct personalities without Stowe's gift for invoking laughter might find the subject matter unbearable. Stowe's use of humor in no way detracts from the ragedy confronting Maggie, particularly since Maggie's family does its utmost to deny, minimalize, ignore, and even antagonize her troubled existence. Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster , Alice Walker's The Color Purple , and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye have skillfully portrayed girls in similar nightmarish situations. Stowe's novel has justifiably earned a place among these works. *- Faye A. Chadwell, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia* Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.