cover image Champeen

Champeen

Heather Ross Miller. Southern Methodist University Press, $19.95 (296pp) ISBN 978-0-87074-446-4

At the beginning of this appealing coming-of-age novel, narrator Titania Anne Gentry is a 43-year-old woman whose two grown daughters think she's a born loser. Determined to prove them wrong, Ti recalls growing up in tiny Badin, N.C., during the 1940s, focusing on the year she turned 13 and realized her dream of becoming a ""champeen"" fire-baton twirler. Her parents were a mess: mother Joan a ""failed movie star, a failed piano player"" and handsome Franklin Gentry an alcoholic womanizer who aimed to be a big-time baseball player and claimed to be a chiropractor, and failed at both. Ti remembers herself as a dreamy adolescent forced to take piano lessons by Joan, who projected her own dreams of concert glory onto her only child. But Ti twirled her baton in secret and fantasized about next-door neighbor Sebastian ""Sabby"" McSherry, a wounded paratrooper discharged from serving in WWII in France. Hoping to capture his heart with her twirling prowess, Ti only succeeded in winning his friendship, which served her better. When Ti performed a dazzling routine with the fire baton Sabby designed for her, she won best of show at the county competition and made her family proud. Thirty years later, she comes to terms with this crucial event in her life, acknowledging that her triumph was one of self-determination and of absolute faith in herself. This, she intends to tell her daughters, makes her a true winner. This framing device, however, is rushed, corny and flat compared to the bittersweet tale of pubescent angst, and Joan and Franklin are unconvincing, stock characters. But narrator Ti is a plucky heroine who's as winsome as she is defiantly fierce. (Dec.)