Cummins, Joseph

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CUMMINS, Joseph

PERSONAL:

Born in Detroit, MI; married Dede Kinerk (an actress); children: Carson. Education: Attended John Carroll University; Columbia University, M.F.A. (writing), 1970.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New Jersey. Agent—c/o Akashic Books, P.O. Box 1456, New York, NY 10009. E-mail—jscummins@earthlink.net.

CAREER:

Writer.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Cannibals: Shocking True Tales of the Last Taboo on Land and Sea (nonfiction), Lyons Press (Guilford, CT), 2001.

The Snow Train (novel), Akashic (New York, NY), 2001.

(Editor and author of introduction) The Greatest Search and Rescue Stories Ever Told (nonfiction), Lyons Press (Guilford, CT), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS:

Joseph Cummins's debut novel, The Snow Train, is written in the voice of three-year-old Robbie O'Conor, and convincingly so according to critics. It is 1952, and Robbie lives in Michigan with his parents and his beloved older sister, Rosemary. Their father sells cars and their mother writes poetry, so the two children are often left to amuse themselves. Everything about the O'Conors suggests the possibility for a happy life, until eight-month-old Robbie is discovered to have a skin disease that soon takes control of his life.

At about this time, Rosemary dies in an accident, and Robbie realizes with alarming clarity that his parents are too deep in their grief to care about or for him as they should. Where once he relied upon his sister for compassion and understanding, young Robbie must now face his tormented life without his champion. How he handles the grief of losing Rosemary and the burden of his disfiguring disease is what lies at the core of The Snow Train.

Cummins's novel moves between Rosemary's death and the time, five years later, when Robbie enters the hospital for experimental treatment of his condition. By seeing through Robbie's eyes, the reader is taken back to the Technicolor world of childhood. What Cummins ultimately presents is a realistic portrait of the terrors and insecurities that pave the path of a child's earliest memorable years.

The Snow Train has been favorably compared to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina in its ability to articulate the thoughts and concerns of a young child without seeming manipulative. "Throughout," wrote Debbie Bogenschutz in Library Journal, "Cummins inhabits the mind of a child and gives him voice as few writers could."