Picture a troubled teen quietly removing this book from the school library shelves, then sitting down between the book stacks and devouring it. Maybe the teenager thought he was the only one hiding a terrible secret about his home life, but after a few pages of Doug Wilhelm’s accessible, educational novel, he will realize there are others just like him, and that there is hope. In The Prince of Denial—Wilhelm’s latest in an acclaimed middle-school series that has taken on tough topics like bullying and cyberbullying—the prolific author tackles the effects of alcoholism on families and, most of all, kids.

 

Using casual, convincing dialogue, Wilhelm drops readers right into the life of Casey Butterfield, seventh grader, on the first page. Casey is trading jokes with his comedic buddy, Oscar, and all is lighthearted. Except it’s not. Casey can’t really let go and hang out with his friend anymore because he needs to get home—and quickly. There are things he has to take care of, like cleaning the house, making dinner, and dealing with his unpredictable alcoholic father. Deeply embarrassed by his home life, Casey tells Oscar none of this; he just disappears like clockwork every day after school.

 

Wilhelm capably takes Casey through the psychological stages familiar to many relatives of addicts: denial, shame, understanding, and, finally, action. The tone ranges from realistic to more scripted, depending on whether teens or adults are speaking.

Although The Prince of Denial risks straying into the lesson-laden territory of a television after-school special, it goes refreshingly off-script just when least expected. All signs point to a textbook intervention arranged by Casey’s Aunt Julie and hosted by Casey himself; but at the last minute, Casey changes tactics.

 

The results are compellingly tension-filled and complex, and ultimately more satisfying than an ending that ties everything up neatly. Casey’s life gets better, but it doesn’t get all better, all at once. The realism will ring true for adolescent readers who might have come away from a storybook ending with more doubts than answers. In Casey, instead, they have a relatable role model for how to handle the tough stuff in their own lives.

 

Sheila M. Trask for ForeWord Reviews
November 30, 2013

from thereviewsister.wordpress.com

http://thereviewsister.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/book-review-pretty-face-by-mary-hogan/

Official review to come soon, but THE CHOSEN ONE is a much better choice for this type of story.

Sister Wife takes place an isolated, deeply religious community that is based on plural marriages. A lot of reviews throw around the words Latter Day Saints and Mormons. In fact, the member of the teen book club who is Mormon did not attend the meeting where we discussed this book. There was some evidence that she wondered if she would be called out, which I can understand her wanting to avoid. But I like to think that this book is less about Mormonism and more about fundamentalism in general. The community in question is never precisely identified with any religion, other than some references to Jesus and the fact that it encourages plural marriages. Mormonism is not the only religious movement to fit those criteria, and the majority of Mormon communities do not resemble the Movement described in Sister Wife. The narrative is told from the point of view of three girls in the community. Celeste who is beginning to question the tenets of the Movement, her sister Nanette, who embraces them with all her heart, and Taviana, who was taken in by one of the leaders who found her turning tricks on the street of the town nearest the community and who considers the Movement a safe peace, but does not especially concern her with the religious aspect of its world. The three points of view are nicely balanced and developed, and you do feel a connection with all three girls. I won't say you end up liking them, because Nanette bugged me more than a little, but even so, I felt a lot of sympathy for her because her attitude to life is a direct result of the lack of choices she has been given. Occasionally there was a little confusion between Nanette's and Celeste's voices, enough that I had to go back a couple paragraphs, but not enough to make me put down the book. I was disappointed with the end of the book, which seems to hurry more than a little toward its end. I also rolled my eyes at the 180 Celeste made regarding motherhood at the moment her child was born. It would have been more believable to me if there had been a slower growth of the mother/child connection over the course of the pregnancy or alternatively in the first weeks after the baby birth.I was also disappointed with the shunning of Taviana, a former sex worker, who seems content to stay in town, but won't attend school because the kids there know of her past. Having grown up in a small town, I'm not sure that staying out of school would have saved her from bullying, and I'm also uncomfortable with the implication that once having been in the sex trade, one must wear it like the mark of Cain and can never leave it behind. The author also gives a brief nod to the dissatisfaction men might have in the Movement, the boys seeing all the girls their age married to the older men of the community, those older men having to support so many children and referee the squabbles inherent in such large families, but this is primarily a feminine book, concentrating on those girls and women who are raised without awareness of the other choices existing in the world, serving as reminder that women are being oppressed not only in faraway countries, but also in our own. Cate

Gravity is set in the 80s in Toronto and revolves around a family of Orthodox Jews. Although the narrative is from the perspective of the younger daughter, Ellisheva Gold, who falls in love with a girl she meets while on vacation, the story is really about the entire family and their struggle with faith. Ellie's mother works to find ways to express her faith despite the restrictive confines of orthodoxy, Ellie's sister Neshama is determined to leave and never look back as soon as she finishes high school, and Ellie's father believes that if the Jews had been more observant, the Holocaust would never have happened. Against this background, Ellie fights doggedly against her attraction to Lindsay and also her desire to know more about the world and science than her religion finds strictly acceptable. When she accepts that she does prefer girls over boys, she must come to terms with what that means for her belief in God. The story resonates at the end with the balance she finds between her faith and her sexuality.