Saying It Out Loud [Hardcover]

Joan Abelove (Author)

Book Description

Age Level: 11 and up | Grade Level: 6 and up

A mother's death leaves her daughter not so much empty as full -- of memories, understanding, appreciation.... More than anything, Mindy longs to be told the truth. From the doctors, from her father. Mom isn't going to get better, she isn't going to leave the white room in the hospital ever again, isn't going to come home to fill the candy bowl with its magical stash of M&M's. But it's the silence, the avoidance and denial, that hurts Mindy the most. The year is 1961 -- clearly evoked in the music and movies (there is a powerful scene involving Spartacus). Mindy's father has absented himself emotionally from her adolescence, after stating, in his absolute way, that she will date no one who's not Jewish. Facing the death of her mother from a brain tumor, Mindy feels like an orphan, and, like her mother, excluded from life -- until friends get her laughing again, until she can see her mother and their relationship squarely and lovingly. This is a book that, though dark at its center, casts light on all sides, with extraordinary tenderness.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Girls who adore Lurlene McDaniel's four-hanky reads will be attracted, then challenged, by this wise and restrained story about a teenager suffering through her mother's death from a brain tumor. Joan Abelove, whose widely praised first teen novel, Go and Come Back, dealt with a culture clash, here writes a very different kind of story. Like most 16-year-olds, Mindy judges and rejects her mother, fighting with her constantly--but always with a fond underlying remembrance of a time when they held hands and were close and comfortable. When her mother develops excruciating neck pain, Mindy is annoyed, convinced that her mom is just faking it for sympathy. With a cool detachment that hides her anxiety, Mindy goes about writing essays for her college applications while her mother undergoes tests in the hospital. Her oily and controlled father ("the man who had excused himself from my adolescence") tells her very little, so when surgery leaves her mother an empty shell, Mindy is taken unawares and left with all the unfinished business of mother/daughter conflict and love, her need to blame, and her anger at being left on her own. With penetrating insight, Abelove shows us a young woman working her way through a complex grief, in a book that will have all daughters (and their mothers) reaching for the Kleenex and resolving to express their love out loud. (Ages 12 and older) --Patty Campbell

From Publishers Weekly

After leading readers on a captivating journey to the Amazon in Go and Come Back, Abelove sets her second novel closer to home. In a series of journal entries beginning November 4, 1961, and ending just over a month later, 16-year-old Mindy describes the process of losing her mother to brain cancer. Abelove lifts Mindy's feelings of isolation and grief to a metaphoric level in the novel, making it a story about leaving childhood behind. With eloquence and a touch of bittersweet irony, Abelove points out the inadequacy of words in times of great emotion. "When I was little, I thought that people died when they used up all their words," Mindy begins. Finding no refuge in a home from which she now feels estranged, Mindy seeks out her longtime friend, Gail, and a new friend, Bobby. They offer no easy answers, but instead empathy, love, even laughter. As Mindy grieves the rift that had developed between her and her mother even before the diagnosis ("My phase, [Mom] called it. Being a teenager, Bobby calls it"), Abelove exposes the protagonist's anger and sadness with a myriad of seamlessly interwoven memories and observations. Perhaps most wrenching is the string of recurring rhetorical questions Mindy poses to her motherAquestions that must go unanswered. Most adolescents regret things they say or do to their mothers; the difference for Mindy is that she never gets the chance to rectify them. A stirring, psychologically truthful novel. Ages 11-up. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 11 and up
  
• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: DK CHILDREN; 1St Edition edition (September 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0789426099
• ISBN-13: 978-0789426093
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,116,359 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent -- moving, funny, very real., October 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Saying It Out Loud (Hardcover)

I read Go And Come Back and was excited to discover Abelove's second novel. It is surprising what a departure this book takes from her first in terms of setting and subject; but like her first book, Saying It Out Loud is a wonderful read. It shifts back and forth between current and past memories, despair and hope, pain and humour. I found myself smiling through my tears at many points in this book. Although the plot, a mother dying of cancer, is decidedly dark, the story manages to be sweet and funny and tender and sad without being maudlin. Saying It Out Loud definitely has a lasting impact.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect!, June 2, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Saying It Out Loud (Hardcover)

This is such a surprising and wonderful book. It's about Mindy's search for solid ground while her mother is dying. I cried and I laughed, but more than that, I marveled. No sentimentality, but plenty of real feeling, real heart, and real insight. I was stunned when I read about Mindy, combing her mother's hair in the hospital while worrying about jiggling her mother's brain tumor. I was delighted by the report by Mindy's friend's younger brother about "The Three Told Sloth." There are dozens of perfect moments like these woven through SAYING IT OUT LOUD. I'm richer and wiser for having read this book, and you will be too.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mother's Impending Death, June 10, 2007

By 

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

This review is from: Saying it Out Loud (Mass Market Paperback)

Mindy is a high school student, living with her mother and father. She's always thought things were pretty good and pretty normal with her family, although she hasn't really related well to her father since she was a child. He doesn't seem to listen to her much at all, and she misses the closeness they used to have when she was little. It doesn't matter all that much to her, though.

But now Mindy's mother is dying of a brain tumor. When she was first sick and would complain about feeling so awful, Mindy was a typical teenager toward her. She thought her mother was being overly dramatic and faking how bad things were. Mindy never believed there was something really wrong until her mother was very sick in the hospital and fading fast.

Mindy is wracked with guilt over the way she has treated her mother lately, and she can't seem to come to terms with the fact that her mother is dying. Her father spends all of his time at the hospital and has grown even more distant from Mindy, who really needs his support. How will she be able to get through this and go on after her mother is gone?

I liked that things didn't all work out in the end of this book. It was a pretty realistic ending, where there was no miracle to make everything all better. I liked how the book showed Mindy trying to get on with her life and be a normal person, even though there was always a part of her thinking about her mother's death.

It seemed as though Mindy's mother lived long enough after they found the brain tumor that Mindy could have made things okay between them so when she died Mindy wouldn't have felt so much guilt. I also thought Mindy's father should have been able to see his daughter was hurting and should have been able to do something about it.