She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana - Softcover

-- Helene Stapinski, author of "Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History"

"If you took the complete works of E. B. White and put them in a blender with the essays of David Sedaris, you might end up with a delicious concoction close to the hilarious, irrepressible charm that is Haven Kimmel."

-- Alison Smith, author of "Name All the Animals"

"Haven Kimmel's memoir is not only great fun, it's full of real pathos and grace. Can I have this family?"

-- Sean Wilsey, bestselling author of "Oh the Glory of It All"

Haven Kimmel draws readers in with her easygoing manner and ability to entertain, but surprises with a bittersweet paean to childhood naivete."

-- "Publishers Weekly"

""She Got Up Off the Couch" returns to the small-town life that made Kimmel's childhood memoir, "A Girl Named Zippy, " a bestseller. But this less-sunny sequel looks more tellingly at things that were glossed over in the first book. Zippy's father, for example, is hardly the hero she worshiped as a young girl. And the dirt and disorder the tomboy gloried in has a darker reason: After decades married to a gambler, Delonda had given up. Kimmel never indulges in bitterness, but by the end a reader will be in no doubt about the Kilimanjaro of obstacles her mother scaled on her way off that couch."
-- "The Christian Science Monitor"

"It is Kimmel's mother's journey from beaten-down housewife to university student and schoolteacher, told through Zippy's irresistible voice, that forms the backbone of "She Got Up Off the Couch." Kimmel deftly chronicles a child's awakening to a world outside tiny Mooreland..."
-- "The Miami Herald"