The Art of Feeling

June 1, 2017
Six months after Mom's death in a car accident, Sam copes with a new disability from that accident, a cryptic boy, family dysfunction, and peer violence.Sam walks on crutches now. Pain regularly "whiplashes" up her leg, bringing with it shards of memory from that "firestorm of glass and steel"--the accident she doesn't remember. Her brother gets high and screams back and forth with their perky sister, while checked-out Dad eats junk food. Enter new boy Eliot, all "pale mystery, sharp-cheekboned stares, and supercilious slouching"--and verbal prickliness. Eliot has congenital insensitivity to pain--he feels no physical pain--but he also exhibits social peculiarity (far beyond awkwardness, well into hurtfulness) and emotional wounds; some of Tims' definitions of disability, trauma, and accountability are murky. Likewise with the antagonist: Anthony (a "magazine-blond, Polo-wearing" drug dealer with a Yale scholarship and a "coffee-soft polite threat voice") commits extreme violence wearing an expression of "nothingness" but is also merely "a boy scared of losing his image." Because she didn't save Mom, Sam's determined to save Eliot, however he acts. Her first-person voice is funny and absorbing. In this "upper-middle-class town in the whitest state in the country," whiteness is standard except that Mom was half Hawaiian (a detail that's never explicated). Wry and engrossing, though jumbled. (Fiction. 13-16)

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August 1, 2017

Gr 9 Up-This novel takes a well-worn but effective page from the handbook of rare disease and disaster YA romances. In this somewhat predictable but ultimately satisfying love story, Samantha-still coping with the death of her mother and the permanent injuries she sustained in a car accident-meets Eliot, who lives with congenital analgesia, a disease which leaves him unable to feel pain. Eliot and Samantha have some serious walls up as a result of their respective traumas, and their friendship-turned-romance seems partially born out of a need to protect someone outside of their own personal tragedies. The relationship is backlit by Eliot's role as the school's number one bullying victim which is perpetrated by resident drug dealer Anthony, a childhood friend of Samantha's who is revealed to have played a key role in her mother's death. Crisis is followed by crisis as the bullying escalates; but with a climactic and teary ending, the walls between the two protagonists start to crumble and healing begins. This novel will satiate the needs of the myriad fans of the box-of-tissues at your side teen drama. VERDICT Purchase where Jennifer Niven's and Nicola Yoon's books are popular.-Joanna Sondheim, Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School, New York City

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