Not Quite a Stranger [Hardcover]

Colby Rodowsky (Author)

Book Description

Age Level: 10 and up | Grade Level: 5 and up

A girl discovers she has a half brother

Charlotte Flannigan (Tottie, for short) leads a conventional life in a conventional family. Her father is a well-respected pediatrician, her mother a popular newspaper columnist, and her younger brother a talkative but otherwise okay kid. But on an ordinary Saturday afternoon, Tottie’s comfortable life is threatened when the doorbell rings. She answers it to find a teenage boy, who looks eerily like her father, standing there. A stranger, but not quite a stranger. His name is Zachary Pearce, and he is her father's – and not her mother's - son.

Told through the alternating perspectives of Tottie and Zach, Colby Rodowsky's novel explores the ramifications of a sudden change in the makeup of a family. Fear, resentment, desperation, and potential for love all surface in this honest and heartfelt story.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Gr. 5-9. When 13-year-old Tottie Flannigan opens the door to Zach, a teen with a striking resemblance to her father, she hopes he's just "some distant cousin." But Zach is Tottie's half-brother, the result of a brief affair that her father, David, had before he met Tottie's mother. David never knew that Zach's mother, Susan, had not given Zach up for adoption, as they had agreed. Now Susan is dead, and Zach has only his father, a stranger, to turn to. In alternating chapters, Zach and Tottie describe their roiling emotions as Zach becomes part of the Flannigan household. With precision and gentle humor, Rodowsky captures the family's subtle dynamics, while touching on a rare subject in children's books. A few questions may nag readers: for example, why didn't Susan contact David before her death? But readers will connect with Zach's bewildered grief and with Tottie's clearly articulated pain and sense of betrayal as she glimpses her father's secrets and regrets and realizes that the neat outlines that shaped her family must be redrawn. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"This warm-hearted novel traces a displaced orphan's adjustment to a new family...As always, the author does a superb job of downplaying the melodrama of an extraordinary situation and evoking the emotions of ordinary adolescents in crisis." --Publisher's Weekly

"Fast moving and appealing." --VOYA

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 10 and up
  
• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR); 1st edition (August 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374355487
• ISBN-13: 978-0374355487
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,888,065 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Family Secrets, April 23, 2007

By 

A. Luciano (Lowell, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Not Quite a Stranger (Hardcover)

Tottie, a thirteen-year-old living with her parents and her little brother, thought her problems were already bad enough. Her brother is bratty and sometimes gross, and her mother writes a newspaper column that often gives embarrassing details about Tottie's life. At least her father is perfect, and her family is pretty tolerable most of the time.

Then a seventeen-year-old boy who looks just like her father shows up at the door. Zach is her father's son; his mother was a woman her father knew when he was in medical school. When this woman found out she was pregnant, she and Tottie's father decided that they would give the baby up for adoption, but then without Tottie's father's knowledge the woman kept the baby and raised him by herself.

Zach has always known about his father but never tried to contact him. But then his mother got sick with cancer and rapidly died. Before she died she wrote down everything she knew about his father and made him promise that when she died he would go to see his father. Zach didn't plan on really doing it, but then someone called social services when they found out he was living alone, so he decided to find his father instead of going into foster care.

Tottie's parents immediately take in this boy and insist he stay to live with them, and Tottie's little brother loves him from the start. But Tottie can't warm to him and especially can't deal with the fact that her father isn't as perfect as she had thought he was.

I liked having two different points of view in this story; it was good to see what two characters had to say about the same situation. I also liked the different ways the different characters related to Zach when he arrived, especially the grandparents.

Tottie's venom toward Zach seemed unwarranted, though. She should at least have had a reason to hate him so much, even if it was just that her parents' attention shifted. But there was no real evidence of that, even.