Saying it Out Loud - Softcover

Abelove, Joan

3.46

233 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141312270 ISBN 13: 9780141312279

Publisher: Puffin Books, 2001

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For fans of Lurlene McDaniel, this is a heartwrenching chronicle of a teen girl's experiences with her mother's brain cancer, based on the author's own life

Mindy has always relied upon her mother-to listen to her, to ease the tension between Mindy and her withdrawn father, to love her. Then her mother is diagnosed with a brain tumor. After her surgery, she is no longer a laughing, lively presence. She has lost the power of speech, and her memory-and Mindy has lost her mother forever. Based upon Joan Abelove's own life, here is the wrenching story of a girl losing her mother early, a girl with a father who will not acknowledge what is going on-a girl who could have been you, or someone you know.

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Review:

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

About the Author:

oan Abelove is an American writer of young adult novels. She attended Barnard College and has a Ph.D in cultural anthropology from the City University of New York. She spent two years in the jungles of Peru as part of her doctoral research and used the experience as background for her first novel, Go and Come Back (1998). Go and Come Back earned numerous awards and citations, including a "Best Books for Young Adults" selection of the American Library Association and "Book Prize Finalist" selection of the Los Angeles Times. she also wrote Saying it Out Loud. She is also in a critique group with Gail Carson Levine, writer of "Ella Enchanted" and "Writing Magic", a guide for child authors who wish to make their stories better. Joan Abelove now lives in New York city with her husband and son.

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