![]() ![]() The story, narrated by the young teen, is both bracingly funny and often achingly sad, as it describes her efforts to overcome a lifetime of poverty, verbal abuse and neglect. The Young Adult novel, published by Candlewick Press of Somerville, is a bittersweet tale of a 13-year-old girl named Carmel Fishkill, after an exit sign along New York’s Taconic Parkway the name has come by way of the girl’s dissolute young mother, who gave birth to her daughter in a car while passing the road sign. Lehrer, of Worthington, liked the idea so much she decided to use it as the basis for a story - and some three years later, her debut novel, “Being Fishkill,” is earning good reviews, including a glowing note in a recent issue of Entertainment Weekly. “We talked about how funny it might be if someone named their kid after the town,” she said. ![]() It was not unfamiliar ground - Lehrer had grown up partly in New Paltz, New York, about 30 miles north of Fishkill - but the name was still a source of amusement. ![]() ![]() During a series of drives with her partner, Amy, through Duchess County in New York a few years back, Ruth Lehrer had to laugh when the couple kept passing a sign for the town of Fishkill, a few miles east of the Hudson River. ![]()
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