Dear Zoe

Dear Zoe

Author
Philip Beard

Plot Summary
Several thousand people died on September 11, 2001. The date alone grabs one’s attention and screams REMEMBER THIS DAY. We see the burning tower and the second airliner crashing into the tower’s twin. News reports of the Pentagon and Pennsylvania tragedies spread new shockwaves, while images of the towers collapsing upon the thousands of souls inside sear our sorrow. Philip Beard frames his poignant YA novel Dear Zoe around that day. But not as one would expect.

It was an ordinary day for 15-year-old Tess DeNunzio—ordinary in as much as she’d missed the bus to school yet again and was biding time until her mother would drive her to school. The day became extraordinary when news of the Twin Towers exploded in her life. Of the thousands of people who died that day one of them would impact Tess and her family with the same gripping grief, but played out in a Pittsburgh emergency room.

In the confusion of those moments, when the eyes of the world were on the Twin Towers, Tess’s three-year-old sister Zoe was hit and killed by a car. That Zoe died that infamous day haunts Tess as much as losing her all together. It drives Tess through an adolescence already complicated by enigmatic feelings for her successful stepfather; her doting, but low-life father; her mother’s descent into depression; blended-family issues informed by these dynamics, and finally her emerging sexuality.

While the world still shivers from the terror of 9/11, Tess stretches to understand and eventually seek her own redemption by writing letters to Zoe. In these letters we glimpse the intimate details of Tess’s life, from her obsessive make-up ritual in the mornings, to her lack-luster performance at school, to her first boyfriend and where that predictably goes. Tess’s letters to Zoe dig at the scab covering Zoe’s death, picking and peeling until Tess confronts the awful truth about Zoe’s death.

Characters
Tess DeNunzio
Tess is a typical fifteen year old teenager who is facing problems in the form of her parents divorcing and having a new stepfather. She was the member in the family that reacted most to Zoe’s death. She acts impassive during her sister’s funeral, but really, she is aching inside, a feeling waiting to be triggered, and finally released during an intercourse with her father’s neighbor, Jimmy.

Daphne Baxter-Gladstone
Tess’s mother, who suffered from depression after Zoe’s death, and was the person who caused Tess to run away to her father’s house late at night.

Sam DeNunzio
Tess’s biological father who works as a lowly plumber and secretly smokes pot without Tess’s knowing. He welcomed Tess’s arrival in the late night with a surprised stare but was glad he had her daughter back in his arms. Tess still thinks of him as her real father, even though he was almost broke.

Greg Gladstone
Greg is Tess’s stepfather and biological father to Zoe Gladstone. He is a successful manager of an electronics company, but doesn’t show bias towards his stepchild. Even though Tess was more wary than afraid or dislike of him, she realizes that he is a responsible father and accepts him in the end.

Jimmy Cranker
Jimmy lives next door to Sam DeNunzio, and secretly climbs up to Tess’s bedroom every night without her father’s knowing. He had also encouraged her to take up a job at the theme park where he worked. He was Tess’s first boyfriend.

Personal reflections
‘Dear Zoe’ revolves around a teenager’s life full of dastardly woes that lie in the path of growing up. Barely a teenager yet, Tess has already been through so much hurdles; her mother’s divorce, the pressure of living with her stepfather, and finally, the death of her three-year-old sister, Zoe. Even before she had died, Tess had loved Zoe dearly as if she was her biological sibling instead of her stepsister. So when Zoe died (knocked over by a reversing car in her neighbourhood) Tess was more than angry; she was furious, a feeling most teenagers feel instead of sorrow whenever dealt with word-spinning ordeals.

What made her even angrier was the fact that no one would ever remember the death of Zoe Gladstone. On a normal day, news like this would surely make it to the newspaper, no matter how small and unimportant the section it is printed under; about the carelessness of drivers and parents and such. However, there were millions of deaths that day, and Tess herself would have been devastated by the nationwide disaster if not for the death of her sister. It had made Zoe’s death seemed all the more trivial.

Tess had never shown any sign of sorrow or grief during Zoe’s funeral, and she herself wondered why. She had been living through the days of her sister’s absence with complete calmness, save for the times she had sudden impulses to do things her own way, like stealing away to her father’s house after having had enough of her mother’s ‘what-ifs’. There, she meets Jimmy a teenager just like her whom she could spill all her problems to without seeming overemotional.

Tess’s letters to Zoe consisted of her life before and after Zoe’s death. It showed how much had changed in Tess’s life after she died. She had turned from a bubbly kid to her stuck up teen who smoked pot. However, the climax was displayed when an influx of emotions came rushing at her during an intercourse with Jimmy, when she felt all the despair and depression she had hid in the secluded corners of her cold heart during the first few days of Zoe’s demise. Before, she had tried to hide from the truth of her sister’s death, but now, all she could do was confront the truth bravely without withering the slightest. It turned out to become a moving story about Tess realizing the impact and implications Zoe’s absence had on her life.

Rating
8/10

My Sister's Keeper

My Sister's Keeper

Author
Jodi Picoult

Plot summary
My Sister's Keeper is about Anna Fitzgerald, a 13-year-old girl who enlists the help of an attorney, Campbell Alexander, to sue her parents for the rights to her body. Kate, Anna's older sister, suffers from acute promyelocytic leukemia, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow. Anna was conceived through in vitro fertilization to be a donor who could save Kate's life. Her parents initially use Anna's umbilical cord blood to treat Kate, and continue to use Anna as a donor for other bodily substances as Kate cycles through remission and relapse over the years. Anna eventually petitions for medical emancipation so that she will be able to make her own decision concerning donating a kidney to Kate, who is experiencing renal failure. Sara, her mother, is an ex-lawyer and decides to represent herself and her husband in the lawsuit. She continually attempts to convince Anna to drop the suit, but Anna refuses.

The guardian ad litem assigned to Anna as her representative is Julia Romano, an old girlfriend of Campbell's. Julia and Campbell met at a private high school, where she was a scholarship student from a poor background and he was a rich kid. They fell in love and enjoyed a relationship until Campbell broke up with her at graduation. Julia never knew the reason but felt it was because of her social class. Although they try to conduct court business professionally, their attraction to one another is apparent. Feeling abandoned again, Julia is frustrated with her relationship with Campbell. He also has a service dog whose purpose he keeps a secret. However, when Campbell has a seizure during Anna's testimony, the purpose of the dog is revealed: he is a seizure dog. Julia then learns that Campbell developed epilepsy after getting into a car accident before their graduation, and broke up with her because he did not want to be a burden. Julia supports him, and they reunite. They eventually marry.

During the trial, Campbell and Sara bring in their witnesses and battle over whether Anna is mature enough for medical emancipation. Julia, who is supposed to deliver a report about who she thinks should win the case, is undecided. While on the witness stand, Anna reveals that Kate told her that she did not want Anna to go through with the transplant, which is why she filed the lawsuit. The judge rules in favor of Anna, and gives Campbell medical power of attorney to help her make any medical decisions until she turns 18.

Soon after being medically emancipated from her parents, Anna is involved in a car accident and left brain dead. With Campbell's permission, her kidneys and other organs are donated to Kate and other patients who might need them. As the book closes, a number of years have passed since Anna's death. Kate explains that she thinks she has survived for so long because someone had to die, and Anna took her place. Whenever she begins to forget her sister, she looks at the scar from her kidney transplant and feels that Anna is with her wherever she goes.

Characters
Anna Fitzgerald
Anna is a 13 year old teenager who is conceived for the purpose of keeping her sick sister alive by donating necessary organs by multiple operations. Eventually, her sister, Kate, asks her to file a lawsuit against donating any of her body parts so that Kate wouldn’t have to go on living in such suffering conditions. Anna is caught between Kate’s order and her parents’ decisions, but won her lawsuit in the end. Sadly, she died just after returning from court and is forever remembered in the memories of her family even after dragging them into so much trouble by suing her parents.

Sara Fitzgerald
Sara is mother to three children, Anna, Kate and Jesse Fitzgerald and wife to Brian Fitzgerald. She is described as a committed mother, but pays more attention to her sick daughter than the rest of her children. She often describes herself as ‘a poor lawyer but a good mother’, but her view is challenged when she has to face Anna’s lawsuit against her and her husband. She demands it ridiculous because she had the idea Anna would do anything to keep Kate alive, like she herself would. She was furious at Anna at first, but realized she still loved her daughter no matter what and was heartbroken when Anna died even though Kate was saved.

Kate Fitzgerald
Kate was diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukemia at the age of two and had been in constant remission and relapse ever since. She was tough battling her disease, but realized she didn’t want to keep on fighting anymore so she asks her sister not to donate her kidney to her. However, Anna dies and Kate is saved, and she feels like she is carrying her very own piece of Anna within her wherever she goes.

Brian Fitzgerald
Husband to Sara Fitzgerald, Brian, too, is torn between her two daughters, but comes to support Anna in the end, and takes her away to live with him temporarily in the fire station where he works. He was the one who extracted Anna from the accident site.

Jesse Fitzgerald
Son to Sara and Brian, Jesse was more than often neglected by his family due to Kate’s disease. Things got worse after Anna filed the lawsuit, and he began to conduct all sorts of juvenal crimes such as smoking pot and arson. Later, he was caught doing arson by his father, who was a fireman.

Campbell Alexander
Campbell is a lawyer who Anna goes to find while filing her lawsuit. He has a dog named Judge who is a service dog, protecting him against epileptic seizures, a disease he had contracted long ago without telling anyone. It was also the main reason he broke up with Julia Romano, his high school sweetheart. Anna believes he took her lawsuit because he was alike her in some ways, one of them being him unable to control over his own body. Was appointed Anna’s medical guardian and involved in the same accident as Anna but survived in the end.

Julia Romano
Julia served as Anna’a guardian ad litem, and was involved in a relationship with Campbell Alexander before. Has a twin sister named Izzy.

Taylor Ambrose
A male teenager who is also diagnosed with leukemia, he meets Kate in the hospital and the two of them became lovebirds immediately. However, Taylor died unexpectedly one morning, causing Kate heart-wrenching sadness.

Personal reflections
This book touched me in many ways, including controversies concerning Anna’s case and severe family ties. It had made me wonder, too, whether Sara or Anna was doing the right thing here. In some ways, I can relate to Anna, a teenager who wants freedom and her own will over her own decisions. However, as a mother, Sara also wants Kate to live, and the only way to do so is to sacrifice her other daughter’s contentment, a way that won’t cost her life, but cause pain and misery to a young child. It is still an argument I have yet to reach its verdict, and this proves how stellar Jodi Picoult writes her masterpieces.

However, it shocked me thoroughly when Anna announced that it was Kate’s decision that Anna didn’t donate a kidney to her. It made me take my eyes off Anna, who was supposedly the main character of the novel, and focus it on Kate instead. Due to the fact that Jodi Picoult didn’t display Kate’s point of view like all the other characters until the very end of the novel, I had never really paid much attention to Kate throughout the book, except treat her as a background drop with a severe disease that had caused all these problems in the first place. But then it occurred to me that Anna wasn’t the only child in the family who was facing gigantic problems, and Kate was suffering just as much too. Heck, even Jesse was neglected by his parents. It can be said that the Fitzgeralds are one screwed-up family.

Having to suffer such a terrible disease at such a young age, and watch her loved ones –like Taylor- leave Kate all of a sudden, made me feel bad. Sympathetic, sure, but also a gut-wrenching sickness that told me life wasn’t fair. How many times had Kate had to watch her own parents waging war against her own sister and blame herself endlessly for the situation they were in? In my opinion, Kate Fitzgerald suffered the most in this novel, not only because of her sickness, but also because of she had to go through by watching her family progress around her, wondering when she would drop dead anytime.

However, I was astonished when Anna died at the end. Well, not exactly, since a friend of mine blurted a spoiler that Anna had passed away earlier on. In fact, the ending was totally different from the one showed in the movie, one that played Kate’s demise. It was such sheer misfortune that Anna had to die right after winning her case. What Kate said in the final chapter got me thinking: only one person had to die, and Anna replaced me. However superstitious that may seem to me, it was also true in some ways.

Verdict? Jodi Picoult is excellent in writing sentimental pieces like this, but just as an extra spoiler, don’t pick up another Picoult book after reading one of hers, because ten pages into a new book might make you bored already, as the contents of every single book she writes are more or less the same.

Rating
9/10

The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones

Author
Alice Sebold

Title
The novel's title stems from a line toward the end of the novel, in which Susie ponders her friends' and family's newfound strength after her death:

"These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections —
sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent — that
happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold
the world without me in it. The events my death brought were merely the bones of
a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The
price of what I came to see as this miraculous lifeless body had been my life."

Synopsis
On December 6, 1973 in Norristown, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, Susie Salmon takes a shortcut home from her school. She is approached by a neighbor, George Harvey, a man in his mid-30s who lives alone and builds dollhouses for a living. He persuades her to enter an underground den he has recently built nearby. He claims that he built it for the kids in the neighborhood. Once she enters, he rapes her and then murders her, dismembering her body and putting it in a safe. Susie's spirit flees toward her personal heaven.

The Salmon family is at first reluctant to accept that Susie has been killed, but then accepts this when Susie's hat was found. The police talk to Harvey, find him odd but see no other reason to suspect him. Jack, Susie's father, becomes suspicious and later begins to obsess about Harvey. Susie's sister Lindsey comes to share these suspicions. Jack, consumed with guilt over not having been able to protect his daughter, remains on extended leave from work and increasingly isolates himself at home. Meanwhile Buckley, the youngest child, tries to make sense of all this as he starts school.

One day late in the summer a detective named Len Fenerman comes to tell the Salmons that the police have exhausted all leads and are dropping the investigation. That night in his study, Jack looks out the window and sees a flashlight in the cornfield. Believing it to be Harvey returning to destroy evidence, he runs out to confront him with a baseball bat. It turns out to be Susie's best friend, Clarissa, and her boyfriend Brian looking for Susie. Brian and Jack struggle, and Brian hits Jack with the bat. As a result he has to have knee replacement surgery. In the wake of this, his wife Abigail begins having an affair with Fenerman, who is a widower.

Still suspicious, Lindsey sneaks into Harvey's house and finds a drawing of the pit, but is forced to leave when Harvey returns prematurely. Sensing danger, Harvey leaves Lansdale as soon as possible and becomes a drifter. A year later the police bulldoze the cornfield and turn up a Coke bottle from the night of the murder with Harvey's and Susie's Connecticut discovers the body of another one of Harvey's victims, and one of Susie's charms nearby. In 1981, a detective in Connecticut links the charm to Susie's murder and calls Fenerman. As they uncover further evidence, the police realize that Harvey is a serial killer who preys on young girls. At about the same time, Susie sees into his traumatic childhood, and develops a grudging pity for her killer.

The following winter Abigail leaves her husband, going to her father's old cabin in New Hampshire and then moving to California, taking a job at a winery. As a result, her alcoholic mother, Grandma Lynn, moves into the Salmons' home to help her son-in-law care for Buckley and Lindsey.

Lindsey and her boyfriend Samuel Heckler become engaged, find an old house in the woods owned by a classmate's father, and decide to fix it up and live there. Sometime after the celebration, while arguing with Buckley, Jack suffers from a heart attack. The emergency prompts Abigail to return from California, but the reunion is tempered by Buckley's lingering bitterness at her for having abandoned him and his father.

Meanwhile, Harvey returns to Norristown, which has become more developed. He explores his old neighborhood and notices the school is being expanded into the cornfield where he murdered Susie. He drives by the sinkhole where Susie's body rests, and where Ruth Connors and Ray Singh are standing. Ruth, an old classmate of Susie's who had felt Susie's spirit go past her after her murder, senses the women Harvey has killed and is overcome. Susie, looking down from heaven, is also overwhelmed with emotion and the two girls exchange positions. Susie, her spirit now in Ruth's body, connects with Ray, who had a crush on Susie in school, and had made plans to go out with her a few days before the murder. Ray senses Susie's presence, and takes advantage of the fact he has Susie back with him for the time being. Susie took the opportunity to fall in love, instead of pursuing her murderer. Afterward, Susie returns to heaven.

She moves on into the larger heaven, still watching earthbound events from time to time. She sees her sister's newborn baby girl, who is named Abigail Suzanne. One day she spies Harvey getting off a Greyhound bus at a diner in New Hampshire in early spring. Behind the diner he sees a young woman and attempts to speak to her, but she rebuffs him. Susie notices some large icicles hanging from the roof, and after the woman leaves, one falls and hits Harvey on the head, knocking him into a nearby ravine and ultimately killing him.

The novel ends with Susie showing us Lindsey's newborn daughter, then tracking away to a newer house where a man has finally found Susie's old charm bracelet. "This little girl's grown up by now," his wife says. "Almost. Not quite," Susie's narrative voice rejoins. "I wish you all a long and happy life."

Characters
Susie Salmon
A 14-year-old girl who is murdered in the first chapter, and narrates the novel from heaven.

Jack Salmon
Susie's father, who works for an insurance agency in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
Abigail Salmon, her mother, whose growing family frustrates her youthful dreams and later has an affair with Detective Len Fenerman.

Lindsey Salmon
Susie's sister, a year younger than she is, thought of as the smartest.
Buckley Salmon, Susie's brother, ten years younger than she is. His unplanned birth forced Abigail to cancel her plans for a teaching career. He sometimes sees Susie while she watches him in her heaven.

Grandma Lynn
Abigail's mother, an eccentric alcoholic who comes to live with her son-in-law and grandchildren after her daughter leaves.

George Harvey
Tthe Salmons' neighbor, who kills Susie and goes unpunished, even though the Salmons come to suspect him, then leaves Lansdale to kill again. Throughout the novel she refers to him as Mr. Harvey, the name she had addressed him by in life.

Ruth Connors
Aa girl Susie went to school with, whom her dead spirit touches as she leaves the earth. She becomes fascinated with Susie, despite barely having known her in her life, and devotes her life to writing about the visions of the dead she sees.

Ray Singh
A boy from India, (via England), the first and only boy to kiss Susie, and later, becomes Ruth's friend. Was first suspected by the police of murdering Susie, but later proves his alibi.

Ruana Singh
Ray's mother, with whom Abigail Salmon sometimes smokes cigarettes.

Samuel Heckler
Lindsey's boyfriend and later her husband.

Hal Heckler
Sameul's older brother who runs a motorcycle repair shop.

Len Fenerman
The police detective in charge of investigating Susie's death and finds her elbow. His wife commits suicide and he later has an affair with Abigail.

Clarissa
Susie's best friend on Earth. Susie explains that she admired Clarissa because she was always allowed to do things Susie was not, like wear platform shoes and smoke. She has a boyfriend named Brian.

Holly
Susie's best friend in heaven. While the text does not say so explicitly, it is implied she is Vietnamese American. She has no accent, although she did on earth, and took her name from Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Her own life and death are never expanded upon.

Mr. DeWitt
The boy's soccer coach at school the coach said to him that Susie came to see him last night. Mr. DeWitt encourages Lindsey, a successful athlete, to try out for his team.

Mrs. DeWitt
Mr. DeWitt's wife, an English teacher at Susie's school. She teaches both Lindsey and Susie.

Holiday
Susie's dog.

Personal Reflections
‘The Lovely Bones’ is a touching story about life after death, and the story plots caught my attention immediately after I read the synopsis off the back of the book. It seemed like an enigmatic story, and it amazed me that Alice Sebold, the author, could come up with such a mind-wrecking plot and turn it into a five hundred plus pages book filled with creatively written emotions and sentiments.

One of the main reasons I wanted this book so much because the movie was airing worldwide, and I wanted to read the book before even seeing the trailer online. The story first started with Susie exclaiming that she was already dead, living in her heaven where she got to do everything she liked. It was almost like a dream come true, Susie had everything she ever wanted and wished for –except being alive again.

Watching over her family and friends from heaven, Susie realised how much she missed her life on Earth, and watched woefully at her sister growing up, doing all the things she was never going to be able to do. She watched her family grieve over her death, watched her father lose his mind, her mother turn to another man for comfort, and her sister trying to be a tough cookie even though Susie knew her sister was aching inside.

The way Alice Sebold managed to write so emotionally made me feel sentimental when I was reading the book. Especially after I finished the story, a remaining sourness still lingered in my mind’s corner, reminding me about how Susie coped with her new home, and could still watch Earth despite her absence. ‘The Lovely Bones’ had even inspired me to write my own story of the same genre, and it was indeed hard to imagine my own ideas concerning life after death without copying Alice Sebold’s idea entirely.

This story provided a new perspective towards heaven and its perks, but it was definitely worth the read.

Rating
9/10