Review: One by Sarah Crossan

Told in short verse, One makes for compelling reading. Grace and Tippi are conjoined twins, fused at the hip. They want what all teenagers want--to be loved and accepted. In some ways, they've become used to being stared at, though they wish that people wouldn't. But most of all, this past year has brought some huge challenges their way. Their father is unemployed and has developed a serious problem with alcohol abuse. Their mother is struggling to keep up with their medical expenses. Meanwhile, their younger sister, a talented ballerina, may be developing anorexia, and she might be missing out on a great number of opportunities because of a lack of family funds. Grace and Tippi know what they need to do to help out with their family's financial situation. But do they really want to sell their story and expose their lives to the world? 

This is the first time that I have read a YA novel told totally in verse and it made for a refreshing change. The story is told from the perspective of Grace, the quieter and more introspective of the pair, who often finds herself having to go along with what Tippi wants. And now that the pair are teenagers and are attending high school (the family situation means that they are no longer able to be home schooled, and they are offered a free education at a private school,) Grace begins to fall in love for the first time, something that Tippi objects to. As the end of the novel loomed, I found myself a little bit heartbroken as they bravely went about making a heart wrenching decision. The ending was quite different to what I expected, though it was handled realistically.

It's not difficult to understand why this novel won the Carnegie Medal. It's innovative and provides insight into the lives of two young women who are both ordinary and extraordinary.

Highly recommended.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more