Ways to Live Forever

Starred review from September 15, 2008
This year's answer to 2007's Before I Die
, this first novel written by a 23-year-old Brit likewise features a young narrator with incurable cancer—and, while it doesn't entirely escape the conventions of the dying-child novel, it skirts easy sentiment to confront the hard questions head-on, intelligently and realistically and with an enormous range of feeling. Sam, facing his third recurrence of leukemia at the age of 11, keeps a journal, and among his entries are facts, questions and lists: “Questions Nobody Answers No. 1 – How do you know that you've died?”; “True facts about coffins”; “Why does God make kids get ill?” Sam starts out with a buddy, another terminally ill boy who shares Sam's sense of humor and who with Sam is taught by a visiting teacher (“No dying at the table, Felix,” she tells him in the opening scene when he is mocking melodramatic portrayals of “the poor, frail child... struggling bravely”). How Sam and his family cope with Felix's death and Sam's own inevitable decline—ultimately, with humor, grace and generosity of spirit—will bring on tears; more impressively, it will also help readers address the hard questions for themselves. Ages 9–12.

Sam, who is only 11, has leukemia. His mother cries a lot, and his father is in denial, but Sam doesn't hesitate to ask hard questions as he faces the end of his latest course of treatment. Mostly, he tries to keep living life instead of waiting for death. This is a first-person point of view story with collections of lists, assorted oddball facts, and poignant, often-funny, observations. Charlotte Parry does a wonderful job with the Brit-accented lads Sam and his querulous friend Felix, who wants to blow something up rather than go quietly into that good night. This is no sad end-of-life tale but rather a gripping how-to-live-forever quest. Parry makes us wish Sam's voice could be with us at least that long. M.C.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine