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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
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.
See all Editorial Reviews
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.
See all Editorial Reviews
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