Listen to Me, Grace Kelly

Jean Free, a library consultant, was an elementary-school teacher and
librarian in Whitby, Ontario.

Jessica Crawford is twelve and a half years old in the summer of 1955
and has moved to Toronto from British Columbia with her recently widowed
mother. Her father has died of Alzheimer’s disease. Jessica has seen
all of Grace Kelly’s movies and privately confided her deepest
feelings to her idol. When Jessica spends the summer with Agatha Adams,
aged 75, at Lake of Bays, she confronts her unhappy memories of her
father’s death, her loneliness in moving from her childhood home, her
feelings about Kelly’s leaving Hollywood to marry Prince Ranier, and
threatening sexual encounters with young men she meets at a riding
stable.

Duncan has a good memory for details of the 1950s (hand-colored
margarine, Studebakers, duck cuts, and white gloves), but it is doubtful
this is relevant to adolescents of the 1990s—surely more likely to
identify with Julia Roberts or Janet Jackson than with Grace Kelly.
References to the poetry of Emily Dickinson would be mostly unknown to
today’s youngsters.

Listen to Me, Grace Kelly would, however, be a useful book for helping
young girls deal with the death of a parent or helping them understand
the impact of debilitating diseases like Alzheimer’s on the family
unit. Duncan is the author of Kap-Sung Ferris, The Toothpaste Genie, and
Cariboo Runaway.