Icy Sparks

Gwyn Hyman Rubio's first novel, Icy Sparks, was published in 1998, and it was picked for Oprah's Book Club in March 2001.

The story is told by Icy Sparks as a grown woman remembering her childhood and adolescence. She is ten years old at the start of it and grows up through the 1950s and 1960s in a mountainous part of Kentucky, in the east of the state, in her grandparents' house, and she is set apart from the other children her age, who avoid her, while the adults of the town pity her.

Then the tics begin, the croaks and jerks and spasms she cannot stop, and she tries to keep them hidden, retreating to the root cellar under her grandparents' house to let them out where nobody can see. She tells one of the few friends she has, Miss Emily Tanner, who runs the local store and is an outsider herself, and as the adults try to work out what is wrong with her she is put in a classroom on her own and finally sent to a mental institution to be observed.