Dicey's Song

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Dicey's Song
First edition cover - later printing
Author	Cynthia Voigt
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Atheneum Books
Publication date	October 1982
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	196 pp (first edition, hardback)
ISBN	ISBN 0-689-30944-9 (first edition, hardback)
Preceded by	Homecoming
Followed by	A Solitary Blue

Dicey's Song is a novel by Cynthia Voigt. It won the Newbery Medal for excellence in American children's literature in 1983.

[edit] Plot

This novel is the second in the Tillerman Series, and picks up the story of the four Tillerman children about a month after the first Tillerman novel, Homecoming, left off. Dicey Tillerman (13) and her three younger siblings James (10), Maybeth (9), and Sammy (6) are now living with their widowed grandmother Abigail Tillerman, or Gram as the children call her, on Gram's farm just outside of Crisfield, Maryland. In Crisfield, the children have the chance to start living a completely new life in their new family home, even though several of the major issues of Homecoming are not resolved.

Even as she gets used to her new life in a real home, Dicey has trouble letting go of her siblings enough to let Gram take over as the parent character. She also worried about her mother who is seriously ill in a psychiatric hospital in Boston.

Through the younger children's new school, the Tillermans make a new family friend, music teacher Mr. Lingerle, who also becomes Maybeth's piano teacher, and who helps the family with many things throughout the story. At school, Dicey makes, initially tentatively, two new friends. They are Mina, a proud, intelligent and friendly African-American girl the same age as Dicey, and Jeff, a loner high school student who likes to play the guitar. To earn money to help Gram with four extra mouths to feed, Dicey starts to work for Millie Tydings, the owner of the local grocery store, who has known Gram since childhood.

Each of the family members has his or her own issues to deal with as they adjust to their new situation. Gram must come to terms with having to accept social security payments to help her pay for her four grandchildren. She also must confront and reexamine her past, in particular her relationship with her deceased husband and her three children. Her eldest son, John, left home and lost contact with his family; the middle child, Bullet, died in Vietnam, and the youngest child, Liza - the children's mother - is now dying in a psychiatric hospital. Initially, Gram refuses to discuss her past with the children, and their attempts to find out about it by climbing into the attic are met with anger.

As the children try to settle into the routines of their new school and after-school jobs, Gram receives a number of letters from the psychiatric hospital in which the children's mother is a patient. The letters do not appear to bring hopeful news, although Gram does not discuss their contents with the children. Dicey is frustrated that her grandmother will not open up and talk about her past, and their mother's past as a child growing up with her two siblings in the same house that Dicey and her brothers and sister are now living. She is also frustrated and anxious that her grandmother will not tell her what is in the letters from Boston, beyond that her mother is no better.

Initially, the children seem to be doing well at school, although Dicey has some reservations about the apparently sudden change in her brothers' behaviour. Although James in placed in a special class for talented children, his desire to make friends makes him draw back from exploring his own intellect at school and instead he tries to conform to what he thinks his peers will find acceptable. Sammy is a born troublemaker, a lively and exuberant boy, but appears to have transformed overnight into a quiet and well-behaved child. In time, Dicey and Gram realize that this is because Sammy believes that his mother's mental illness was caused by his bad behaviour in previous schools, so he tries to suppress his personality to avoid making his Grandmother ill, too. Maybeth initially seems to be doing well and making friends, but her inability to learn and keep up with her peers at school soon causes problems. By working together to try to understand the problems Maybeth faces (it is hinted that she may have dyslexia as well as other learning difficulties), Dicey, James and Gram start to help her learn by teaching her to read at home.

Dicey initially does not care about school, seeing it only as a necessary evil to endure every day before she can go to her evening job and then home to her family. When she writes an outstanding essay in her English class that describes her mother's descent into poverty and mental illness, she is accused by her teacher of plagiarism, as the story she writes far exceeds the merits of those of her classmates. Mina stands up for her, and her teacher rescinds his claim. This is the start both of Dicey's realization that she can make friends and that learning and school are important, as she comes to understand that she does not have to be a parent figure for her siblings, and that she too has needs that she should explore. In a shopping trip in the nearest town with Gram, Dicey and Gram discuss the children's difficulties and Gram makes an effort to explain adolescence and growing up to Dicey, who is initially reluctant but accepts and is grateful for Gram's efforts to understand her.

In December, the psychiatric hospital in Boston calls and Gram and Dicey travel there. When Dicey and Gram arrive at the hospital, cold and inappropriately dressed for the harsh winter, the two find that she is catatonic, not responding to any treatment, and will not live long. The reality of the situation is very hard for both Dicey and Gram to come to terms with, even though they knew what to expect. Dicey's mother soon dies and, since they don't have any money to transport her body from Boston to Crisfield, they decide to cremate her. Dicey is gifted a hand-carved wooden box by the owner of a local gift store who is touched by her situation, and by Dicey's and Gram's dignity despite their obvious poverty and the hard situation. The gift of the box is deeply moving both for Dicey and Gram, and cements their new-found hope and belief that by reaching out to others, even strangers, it is possible to receive understanding and friendship.

When Dicey and Gram arrive back in Crisfield, the family buries the wooden box containing their mother's ashes under the paper mulberry tree in their front yard. The paper mulberry tree holds a special significance throughout this book and in Homecoming, where in Dicey's first meeting with Gram, Gram describes the tree, splitting under its own weight and so held together with wire, as being "like families". Dicey wonders, at the close of the book, what the wire is like in this metaphor; as Gram finally starts to open up by showing the children photograph albums of the past that she could not face, and as Dicey starts to wonder about contacting Gram's remaining living child, the reader understands that the wire could represent love, hope and courage.