Scrambled Eggs at Midnight

by Brad Barkley & Heather Hepler

After reading 19 Minutes last month, I was in serious need of light-hearted stuff. So I raided the Young Adult shelf!

This book is about two teenagers with tortured relationships with their parents, and how they break free from them. Eliot is the son of a successful Christian fat camp director, who feels his father has become less and less real the more wealthy he becomes. Cali (short for Calliope) is the daughter of a wandering artist who (according to the book's blurb) "seems less and less interested in being a parent"; Cali is straining hard toward planting roots and creating a home.

They meet one summer because Eliot's family's Christian fat camp is near the grounds of the medieval fair where Cali's mom sells her jewelry and takes on roles to make money before moving on to some place new.

From the beginning, there is an intense connection between Eliot and Cali. But this isn't your typical teen romance (did you ever read the Sweet Dreams series as a teenager?--I loved the first 40! But their plots were very straightforward: girl meets boy, girl & boy like each other but there are obstacles to overcome OR one of them dislikes the other intensely until some epiphany makes him or her change his/her opinion and they live happily till college or they outgrow each other, which ever comes first).

Because of their particular circumstances--Cali's mom yanking her up and away from her dad and making her live a gypsy life since she was about 8 or 9, Eliot feeling more and more distant from his dad and seeing the same thing happen to his mom--it seems that Cali and Eliot are meant to be each other's rocks, anchors, safeties. But each of them is also incredibly bright and self-aware, which makes me think that their relationship could be that rare thing in this world--a childhood romance that will grow with them and survive.

My Sister's Keeper

by Jodi Picoult

I have not been goofing off since I last posted, more than a month ago. (In fact, I talked about Jodi Picoult's 19 Minutes next door.)

But with the unhappy timing of having read 19 Minutes and the Virginia Tech shootings, I've been cheering myself up with hapier reads like Meg Cabot's Size 12 is Not Fat and Shopaholic and Baby. And re-reads of Jennifer Weiner.

I'm fast becoming a Jodi Picoult fan, though, and when I saw this book at the library I decided to risk a serious read again.

This book raises interesting questions--how far would you go to save your child's life? Would you, as Sara and Brian do, conceive and carry a perfect genetic match, so that their daughter Kate (who is diagnosed with a deadly form of leukemia at age 3) would have a better chance of surviving her disease? Would you then continue to use that other child (in this case, Anna) every time your sick child has an emergency and needs blood or bone marrow?

Also: at what point in a person's life does (s)he become master of his/her body?--When can a child say, "I want to have plastic surgery," or "I want to lose weight."--and be entitled to be taken seriously?

What if this child says, "I don't want to donate one of my kidneys to my sick sister" (as Anna does, when she is 13 and Kate is 17)?

This story, of 11 days in a family's life, is set in motion when Anna sues for the right to be medically emancipated from her parents, even as her sister slides further into kidney failure.

The story is complex--the reader doesn't doubt Brian & Sara's love for all their children, even as they are so consumed by Kate's health that they pretty much ignore Jesse, their firstborn, who then finds an interesting outlet for his own feelings. And Anna is clearly not just Kate's life-support system--it's not like her parents only see her as a way of keeping Kate alive. Her parents love her fiercely, as well. Although perhaps they take her for granted because she is healthy.

And Anna doesn't sue for emancipation because she is tired of Kate living off her.

The book ends in both tragedy and triumph, though it wasn't the ending I suspected--I would accuse JP of manipulating me emotionally and going for the "cheap cry"--but for all that I didn't really like the ending, it works.