Saying It Out Loud - Hardcover

Abelove, Joan

3.46

233 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0789426099 ISBN 13: 9780789426093

Publisher: DK CHILDREN, 1999

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After Mindy's mother dies from a brain tumor, her life with her emotionally distant father feels empty, until, with the help of her friends, she slowly begins to reach acceptance and understanding. 15,000 first printing.

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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:

For Joan Abelove, living in the Peruvian jungle to do her fieldwork was a life transforming experience. Her two years there and the friendships she developed with the Amazonian people fostered a deep love and keen interest in anthropology and led her to change her course of study. After returning from Peru, Abelove transferred from the clinical psychology program, where she had been a Ph.D. student, to the anthropology department, where she got her doctorate in cultural anthropology.

Go and Come Back (DK Ink, 1998), Abelove's first novel for young adults, was based on her fieldwork in the Amazon jungle. Booklist, in a starred review, remarked that "Abelove's story of a Peruvian tribe in the 1970s has a freshness to it . . . Abelove's remarkable gift is letting readers see their own culture through the eyes of someone whose values are completely different . . . Full of life and packed with characters that by turns irritate and enlighten, Go and Come Back is a startling, vibrant read."

Abelove's second book for young adults, Saying it Out Loud (DK Ink, 1999), recounts the story of a young woman dealing with her mother's illness and eventual death from cancer. It was immediately received with much praise, including three starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal and Booklist magazine which states that "this proves once again that Abelove can write books that are not only very complex but also vibrant and infused with tenderness."

Born in Florida and now residing in New York City, Abelove is married and has one son. She graduated from Barnard college with a degree in English literature and got her NYC Teaching License from the Bank Street School of Education. She received an A.B.D. in clinical psychology and a Ph.D. in cultural anthroplogy from CUNY.

Abelove taught undergraduate anthropology courses as an adjunct professor for several years at various colleges in the New York City area. She has presented papers at the American Anthropological Association conventions and at the Bennington Anthropological Conference on the Amazon.

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