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Better Together
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Editorial Reviews
From School Library Journal
Grade 6-8–In this novel's gripping first scene, eight-year-old Michael Rosetti is abandoned by his father at the Baltimore airport, his hopes of living with his dad after his mother's remarriage dashed by the man's self-centeredness and irresponsibility. Placing a collect call to his 15-year-old sister, Lily, Michael waits until she and their baby half brother fly from New York City to get him and return before their mother and stepfather get back from taking their older sister, Reb, to college. Michael swears Lily to secrecy, and Cooney uses this implausible scenario to tell the story of the teenager's growing fury at her father's callousness and its personality-changing effect on her brother. Throughout the book, Lily grapples with her difficulty in reconciling the Christian beliefs and ethics she learns at church and her inability to forgive her father. When Reb returns from college and announces her impending marriage, planning to have her father walk her down the aisle, the story of his cruelty to Michael finally comes out. It is their quiet, forbearing stepfather who comes up with a way to avoid a confrontation between Lily and her father while preserving Reb's and Michael's loyalty to him, however misguided. Despite many flaws, the story is engrossing and the resolution satisfying. Cooney is somewhat heavy-handed in her criticism of school-system counseling, but she manages to avoid religious platitudes, grounding the story in a teenager's conflict with applying her beliefs to a difficult family reality.–Marie Orlando, Suffolk Cooperative Library System, Bellport, NY
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Readers who seek out Cooney's novels for their clever, suspenseful scenarios--as in The Face on the Milk Carton (1990)and its sequels--may be surprised to find that, in her latest, the expected thrills move into an exploration of Christian forgiveness. The book's first section plunges readers into the action: an 8-year-old is abandoned at an airport by his self-absorbed, negligent father, and his 15-year-old sister, Lily, makes a secret airplane journey to retrieve him. The toll that her father's cruelty takes on Lily unfolds in the book's two remaining sections, in which Cooney writes movingly about the dynamics of divorce, the hate that "occupied [Lily] like an army," and the sense of cosmic resentment that shakes her relationship with God. Though the psychological and spiritual themes may lose some readers, the promise of a resolution to Lily's anguish will pull at readers (non-Christians included) to the end, where meaty questions about God's obligation to believers, and vice versa, make the book a natural choice for youth ministers to share with teens. Jennifer Mattson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
See all Editorial Reviews
Grade 6-8–In this novel's gripping first scene, eight-year-old Michael Rosetti is abandoned by his father at the Baltimore airport, his hopes of living with his dad after his mother's remarriage dashed by the man's self-centeredness and irresponsibility. Placing a collect call to his 15-year-old sister, Lily, Michael waits until she and their baby half brother fly from New York City to get him and return before their mother and stepfather get back from taking their older sister, Reb, to college. Michael swears Lily to secrecy, and Cooney uses this implausible scenario to tell the story of the teenager's growing fury at her father's callousness and its personality-changing effect on her brother. Throughout the book, Lily grapples with her difficulty in reconciling the Christian beliefs and ethics she learns at church and her inability to forgive her father. When Reb returns from college and announces her impending marriage, planning to have her father walk her down the aisle, the story of his cruelty to Michael finally comes out. It is their quiet, forbearing stepfather who comes up with a way to avoid a confrontation between Lily and her father while preserving Reb's and Michael's loyalty to him, however misguided. Despite many flaws, the story is engrossing and the resolution satisfying. Cooney is somewhat heavy-handed in her criticism of school-system counseling, but she manages to avoid religious platitudes, grounding the story in a teenager's conflict with applying her beliefs to a difficult family reality.–Marie Orlando, Suffolk Cooperative Library System, Bellport, NY
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Readers who seek out Cooney's novels for their clever, suspenseful scenarios--as in The Face on the Milk Carton (1990)and its sequels--may be surprised to find that, in her latest, the expected thrills move into an exploration of Christian forgiveness. The book's first section plunges readers into the action: an 8-year-old is abandoned at an airport by his self-absorbed, negligent father, and his 15-year-old sister, Lily, makes a secret airplane journey to retrieve him. The toll that her father's cruelty takes on Lily unfolds in the book's two remaining sections, in which Cooney writes movingly about the dynamics of divorce, the hate that "occupied [Lily] like an army," and the sense of cosmic resentment that shakes her relationship with God. Though the psychological and spiritual themes may lose some readers, the promise of a resolution to Lily's anguish will pull at readers (non-Christians included) to the end, where meaty questions about God's obligation to believers, and vice versa, make the book a natural choice for youth ministers to share with teens. Jennifer Mattson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
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