It’s no wonder that a book with the title The Warden’s Daughter deals with the theme of prisons. Scenes of the prison and inmates are found in nearly every chapter of the book. In juxtaposition, at the center of the book is a twelve year old girl, Cammie O’Reilly, who enjoys a summer as free as the wind. By the end of the book things were turned around and I had to reevaluate who had truly been in prison.
Cammie lives with her father, the warden of Hancock Country Prison. Her mother was killed twelve years prior when pushing Cammie’s baby carriage out of the way of a milk truck. Cammie and her father live in an apartment attached to the prison. One door leads down to the female prisoner’s exercise yard. The other door leads to freedom.
Each summer, all of Cammie’s life, her father has brought in a female trustee from the prison to look after Cammie while he is at work. This summer it is young, red-haired prisoner named Eloda Pupko. Cammie is just starting to feel a driving need for the mother she never had. She gets it in her head to make Eloda be her mother. It doesn’t go as well as she’d hoped.
Each day Eloda comes up from the prison and returns to it each evening. Callie, on the other hand, spends the summer running wild on her bicycle around the town. As the warden’s daughter she enjoys a certain celebrity among the citizens. There’s a kind of mob boss ownership feeling, except that she’s only twelve and not evil. She stuffs herself with Milky Ways, two at a time. Eats scrapple and banana splits, then throws up in a spittoon. Meets a boy and doesn’t care. Has snowball fights with the girls with castaway ice behind the old icehouse.
Ironically, Cammie’s freedom extends to the prison itself. Cammie is allowed to spend time with the female inmates during their exercise hour in the prison courtyard. She is the inmates’ favorite. They love her, especially one named BooBoo. BooBoo takes Cammie under her wing and teaches her the tricks of shoplifting while at the same time making her promise not to do it. Cammie realizes that BooBoo isn’t a good mother figure, but still, she loves her.
As the summer goes on we start to recognize another sort of prison—guilt. Cammie is an inmate. Her need for a mother—her need to understand the loss of her mother—is a volcano pushing against the prison of Earth. To the reader it erupts spectacularly. To those with Cammie in the book it’s just bad behavior. As her father asks one night after the searchlights find Cammie sleeping in the middle of the prison courtyard, “What’s wrong with you?”
The ending is a sweet reversal of the prison theme. Who is free and who is not? Who is it that can actually understand and help Cammie? I’m getting soft in my Grandpa years. I had to turn my head away from my seventeen year old daughter who was reading the book to me. I didn’t want her to see.
The book is beautifully conceived and written. It helped unlock some prison doors of my own. I hope I will be a better human being for it.
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These books by Tory Anderson are now available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback format:
