Customer Reviews

Not Quite a Stranger

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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.