2018 School Spending Survey Report
Gr 6–9—Sarah Nelson is dreading the seventh-grade family tree project and hoping her alcoholic father, a college professor, will move them from Garland, Texas, by summer's end. That has been their pattern whenever local acquaintances discover, usually through a resurfacing news story about two notorious court trials, that Sarah is the sole survivor of her mother's attempt to drown her two-year-old twins 10 years earlier. With a plant as her only confidante, she conducts imaginary conversations with her dead brother and looks for signs of insanity in herself as she puzzles over the twice-yearly cryptic greeting cards from her mother, a patient in a home for the insane in Wichita. An end-of-sixth-grade letter-writing assignment has Sarah sharing her loneliness and confusion with an idealized father, Atticus Finch, from To Kill a Mockingbird. But at least her own father has agreed to spare her a boring summer with her grandparents in Houston, deciding instead to leave her in the charge of a college student. Charlotte's romantic preoccupations, benign neglect, and attractive brother who shares Sarah's love of words start her on a road to self-discovery and give her the courage to challenge her father's well-intended but misguided attempts to shield her from her past. Sarah is an introspective protagonist whose narrative, interspersed with letters and word definitions, keeps readers absorbed. The horrific premise is not belabored, and the focus remains on the plight of a girl juggling the normal challenges of adolescence with a complex family situation. Secondary characters add interest and texture to this compelling novel.—Marie Orlando, formerly at Suffolk Cooperative Library System, Bellport, NY“You’ve never met anyone like me,” begins this affecting book. “Unless, of course, you’ve met someone who survived her mother trying to drown her and now lives with an alcoholic father.” Sarah was only two when her mother submerged her in the kitchen sink—and succeeded in drowning Sarah’s twin brother, Simon. Mom pled insanity and was confined to a mental institution; since then, mental illness has weighed heavily on Sarah (her career-day musing: “Why not wait until you figure out if you are going to inherit crazy before you decide on an occupation?”). For much of the story, Sarah is just trying to live her ordinary middle-school life. She has a best friend (well, two: one is human, one’s a plant she talks to), a nemesis, a crush. Her dad is a professor; drinking problem notwithstanding, he’s a kind and loving father who had to endure his own legal battle for “failing to protect us” and who still gets recognized—and judged—by strangers. The book is never maudlin, even at the breath-catching climax when Sarah goes to see her mother. And if there are a few too many plot points and the protagonist’s voice sounds less like a just-turned-twelve-year-old’s and more like a highly self-aware (and impossibly resilient) grownup, it’s well worth looking past in order to appreciate the extraordinary heart of the story. elissa gershowitz
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