Waiting to Waltz by Cynthia Rylant

In Waiting to Waltz, I followed a girl's journey growing from a child to a young lady with a backdrop of people and places entwined with her youth. Through the sparse words of peotry recounting memorable events, I was able to picture the town of Beaver and the girl. As one who generally avoids poetry, I was pleasantly surprised.

In the first part of the collection, the girl enjoys childhood joys like wax lips and remembers events like misspelling woke at the spelling bee or when her mother ran over a dog. But, in the second part of the collection, the girl begins to reflect on her fatherlessness, her freedom during the summers, and boys. At times she still feels like a child but realizes she is no longer. During the thunderstorm she acts brave "but inside, [she is] a little girl crying." (p. 19).

The girl's experiences with religion were unexpected to me. The people of Beaver seem religious but the girl's family does not seem to be. In Holiness, she was frightened at the Pentecostal service. When she took her mother to church in Saved, her mother was embarrassed by the girl's behavior. She even wishes she were Catholic because of the "slick-haired boys" (p. 37).

Without reading all of the poems in the collection, I would have an incomplete understanding of the story. They all work together to tell of this girl's journey toward adulthood.