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44 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Complicated emotions and a totally new plot, February 3, 2008
This review is from: Sweethearts (Hardcover)
Jennifer Harris is able to do what every adolescent girl hopes for--she reinvents herself between middle school and high school from the tubby outcast with a lisp to a beautiful individual with all the right friends. She loses weight, changes her name to Jenna, transfers schools and even gets the perfect boyfriend. But she also has the same fears as every teenage girl--she is afraid that all of the perfect people in her perfect life will see past the skinny exterior and expose her for the fraud she believes she is.
At first glance, this book may seem like a pretty mainstream YA novel about a girl struggling with self-image. But there is so much more depth to Jenna's life, and thanks to the return of her childhood best friend Cameron Quick, Jenna begins to see that she is a lot stronger than she first believes.
Though this novel is about childhood sweethearts and the love that binds them through shared experiences as well as time apart, this is not a teen romance. It is the story of how people help us see who we truly are and that we have the inner strength to face our pasts, no matter how horrific, and live up to a greater future.
While I love Jenna and Cameron, my favorite characters came from some unexpected sources. Alan, Jenna's stepfather, acts as a grounding place for Jenna and becomes the parental figure whom Jenna turns to when she needs someone the most. Jenna's schoolmate Steph is another vibrant character who sees more of the real Jenna than she realizes.
In Jenna, Zarr manages to capture what few young adult authors are able to. Jenna lives on the fringes of teenage life and has always thought of herself as a reactor rather than an initiator, something that the majority of teenagers are but that authors rarely choose to write about. Jenna has also experienced some things that have shaped who she is, but the things she experiences are not on the extremes of the horrific nor are they the "poor me" occurrences of the shallow-minded.
I found this book both relatable and powerful without being over the top or trite. It elicited a lot of emotions that I am still coming to terms with even hours after finishing, and I'm sure I'll still be thinking about it even days from now. With rich characters and a totally new concept, I enjoyed every minute of this book.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Truth of the Matter, The Heart of the Matter, January 21, 2008
This review is from: Sweethearts (Hardcover)
When Jennifer was in elementary school, she had only one friend. His name was Cameron, and he meant the world to her. When they were together, the taunts of their classmates didn't matter . . . as much. Jennifer always felt safe with Cameron.
That is, until one day in fifth grade, when something horrible happened to them. Shortly thereafter, he stopped coming to class. Their teacher said he moved; their classmates said something worse. Cameron was gone for good - or so Jennifer thought. On the day she turned seventeen, he walked back into her life. A life very different from the one she used to lead.
In the eight years since her friend's disappearance, Jennifer has changed considerably. She lost weight, gained friends, and started going by Jenna. She attends a small charter school and has her first serious boyfriend, the popular and sweet Ethan. Her once-single mother, who struggled for years to make ends meet, married a kind man. Alan has given Jenna and her mother his last name and a stable home.
Though Jenna has changed on the outside, she's still Jennifer on the inside, filled with insecurities and painful memories, all of which surface the minute she sees Cameron again.
He's grown up too. He's taller now, and his heart is heavier, but he's still Cameron. He's come back in search of closure, something Jenna's new life has never quite given her. Whether or not they find it depends on their willingness to deal with what happened when they were nine years old.
Cameron's reappearance causes Jenna to re-evaluate her present life. She knows that she wouldn't be who she is now if she hadn't gone through those experiences as a child and if she hadn't Cameron as a friend. How different would her life have been if he had stuck around? How different will it be now that he's back? Suddenly, her boyfriend, her friends, and her routines at home and at school seem surreal. She unintentionally slips back into some old habits, such as stealing candy bars and binge eating when she's alone.
Relayed in first-person narrative, Jenna's journey is emotional and believable. When she shed those pounds, she didn't shed her shyness. Though she could change her name, she couldn't change what happened to her. Meanwhile, Cameron's struggle to stay strong while he searches for a place in the world makes him an interesting mix of protector and someone who needs protecting. Though she doesn't ask him to be, nor is he trying to be, he isn't Jenna's White Knight. They both need saving in one way or another.
Though I greatly enjoyed Sara Zarr's debut novel, Story of a Girl, I was even more impressed by her sophomore Sweethearts. It's a compulsive read filled with tension and truth. Readers will want to know what happened to the main characters as children, something which is revealed in flashes and slivers throughout the book, and they will care what happens to them as teenagers.
Sweethearts by Sara Zarr delicately describes a fragile friendship. Second chances don't come around very often, and when they do, you have to make choices for yourself, for better or for worse, and find the strength to move on.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Richie's Picks SWEETHEARTS, April 3, 2008
This review is from: Sweethearts (Hardcover)
What is a friend? Who are your real friends?
Nowadays, we all have MySpace friends and listserve friends, IM friends and texting friends, in addition to our traditional school friends, neighborhood friends, and those we acquire over the years through a variety of life experiences.
For me, there was a girl with an abutting backyard with whom I played well when I was a preschooler, long-lost buddies in black and white photos from my earliest school days, the tall guy who befriended me on the playground following our family's move in the middle of my third grade year (I still know and visit him.), and a boy from Smithtown I met at daycamp with whom I remember walking with our arms around each other one summer. There were study friends and Boy Scout friends and the members of all the various extracurricular and social groups to which I belonged during high school. Being as old as I am, the list of old friends goes on and on and on.
But we might ask ourselves: How many of those friends "for whatever reason, are as much a part of you as your own soul"? And to how many people have we been such a friend?
"There are things I want to remember about Cameron Quick that I can't entirely, like the pajamas he wore when he used to sleep over, and his favorite cereal, or how it felt to hold his hand as we walked home from school in third grade. I want to remember exactly how we became friends in the first place, a definite starting line that I can visit again and again. He's a story I want to know from page one.
"My brain doesn't seem to work that way. Most specific things about Cameron are fuzzy -- the day we met, how we got so close, exact words we said to each other. There are only moments, snapshots, pieces of a puzzle. Once in a while I feel them right in my hand, real as the present, but usually it's more like I'm grasping for vapor. I understand that you can never have the whole picture; inevitably, there's stuff you don't know, can't know. But when it comes to Cameron I always want more than I have, would like to be able to take hold of at least one or two more pieces, if only because I'm convinced there are parts of myself hidden inside them."
As an impoverished elementary student in thrift store garb, Jennifer Harris is shunned by the schoolmates who tauntingly call her "Fattifer." Her closet eating habits -- which include frequently stealing food from schoolmates and stores -- are clearly the product of regularly being left to fend for herself by her single mom who is forever running between work and nursing school.
The one person in the world Jennifer can always depend on is her only friend and fellow outcast Cameron Quick. But Cameron has his own problems and secrets, including a nightmarish father as Jennifer learns first-hand that horrific day -- her ninth birthday -- when she visits Cameron's house to collect a present he has made for her.
Soon thereafter, Cameron and his family disappear and the eventual rumor at school is that he has moved away and then died. Jennifer's mother acknowledges that the rumor is, indeed, fact.
"The two questions came into my head again: How could you have left me? Why didn't you say good-bye?"
Eight years later, Jennifer Harris has reinvented herself into Jenna Vaughn, a teen who has determinedly shed her excessive weight and her former lack of composure. Her mother's remarriage has cleared up the former problems of poverty. Jenna attends a charter school where she has popular friends and a popular boyfriend: ("Sometimes I worried that I should be feeling more for him than I actually did, but I tended to push those worries aside and focus on how it felt to be part of it, to be seen by everyone as worthy of couplehood").
Eight years after she last sees him, Cameron Quick suddenly and inexplicably reappears in Jenna/Jennifer's life just as precipitously as he had disappeared from it. The presence of Cameron will compel her to determine whether she is Jenna or Jennifer.
I was thoroughly caught up in the tale of SWEETHEARTS, a story of a once-in-a-lifetime friendship and what has befallen the two long-lost friends as they pursued their radically divergent paths through childhood and adolescence. It is a book that sure has me contemplating relationships with friends past and present.
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