In this fairly convincing portrait of a teenager coping with her mother’s onset of Alzheimer’s disease, Sylvie, 14, has always been an excellent student, even through her parents’ divorce. Her grades begin to slip, however, as her beautiful, talented mother, Marianne, starts behaving in dangerously crazy ways. She can’t tell the time, has forgotten how to cook, and their usually fastidious apartment has grown filthy. The book opens on the day Sylvie finds Marianne perched high on the balcony of their tenth-floor Winnipeg apartment, apparently ready to jump. Sylvie thereafter attempts to cope on her own, ignoring school, her piano lessons, and her best friend, Marissa, who is coping with her own abusive, alcoholic mother. Angry and embarrassed, Sylvie allows an elderly neighbor, Mrs. Rathbone, to help; discovers a sympathetic listener in a schoolmate, Paul; and finds that her father is more than willing to rejoin his family as they learn more about Marianne’s diagnosis. Sylvie’s initial confusion is authentic, and often heart-stopping; Moore makes vivid how much of a stranger Marianne becomes to her daughter. Less coherently limned are Sylvie’s external reactions. While there are hints that she is dressing provocatively because of her mother’s illness, the connection never becomes clear, while her early reliance on Mrs. Rathbone’s interference is not in line with the rest of her furtive behavior. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55074-535-2
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Kids Can
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
Categories: TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FAMILY
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Couloumbis’s debut carries a family through early stages of grief with grace, sensitivity, and a healthy dose of laughter. In the wake of Baby’s sudden death, the three Deans remaining put up no resistance when Aunt Patty swoops in to take away 12-year-old Willa Jo and suddenly, stubbornly mute JoAnn, called “Little Sister,” in the misguided belief that their mother needs time alone. Well-meaning but far too accustomed to getting her way, Aunt Patty buys the children unwanted new clothes, enrolls them in a Bible day camp for one disastrous day, and even tries to line up friends for them. While politely tolerating her hovering, the two inseparable sisters find their own path, hooking up with a fearless, wonderfully plainspoken teenaged neighbor and her dirt-loving brothers, then, acting on an obscure but ultimately healing impulse, climbing out onto the roof to get a bit closer to Heaven, and Baby. Willa Jo tells the tale in a nonlinear, back-and-forth fashion that not only prepares readers emotionally for her heartrending account of Baby’s death, but also artfully illuminates each character’s depths and foibles; the loving relationship between Patty and her wiser husband Hob is just as complex and clearly drawn as that of Willa Jo and Little Sister. Lightening the tone by poking gentle fun at Patty and some of her small-town neighbors, the author creates a cast founded on likable, real-seeming people who grow and change in response to tragedy. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-399-23389-X
Page Count: 211
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
Categories: TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FAMILY | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES
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Patneaude (The Last Man’s Reward, 1996, etc.) hatches a silly plot and one-dimensional characters, but preteens might enjoy this piece of escapist entertainment about a boy wrongly committed to a mental asylum. Peter’s weak-willed mother has lied to him all his life about his real father, allegedly dead. Peter doesn’t get along with his stepfather, a car salesman, who schemes to have him committed by a corrupt psychiatrist. In the asylum, Peter befriends two disturbed inmates and a health technician who help him escape. Among the absurd plot concoctions: Peter’s five-year-old half-brother, Lincoln, is psychic, allowing Peter extraordinary access to clues he needs to find his real father; and that his father has been searching for Peter all along. Patneaude resurrects elements from his first novel, Someone Was Watching (1993), in which a supposedly drowned sister has really been kidnapped, and in which a cross-country trip unfolds without much mishap. His writing style, however, is so robust that even if readers find little remotely connected to reality in these pages, there’s more than enough suspense in the fast-paced narrative to keep them entertained. (Fiction. 8-13)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8075-9098-3
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
Categories: TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FAMILY
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