(Harper Collins, $29.99)
oathilda Savitch is 13 and has a much tougher life than most teenagers. Unpopular at school, she also has to contend with being ignored by her parents, who are too busy grieving over the death of her sister the previous year to give her the attention she deserves. Instead she’s trying to get that from her best friend Anna, on whom she has a major crush, and the boy next door, Kevin, who has blue hair.
on top of that, she’s trying to crack her sister’s email password so she can find out more about why she died and at whose hands. This might sound like a young adult novel but it isn’t.
oathilda is quite clever and a bit mad and, in the hands of well-known American playwright Victor Lodato, she’s delivered alive and kicking as a tortured adolescent struggling with school, terrorism, sex, death, an alcoholic mother and a spineless (if you ask me) father.
As I read it, which I did in one hit, I found it so compelling, I was reminded of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (now being made into a film by Peter Jackson and the trailer, if you google it, looks amazing) and also of a 1997 movie called The Ice Storm, which was based on the novel of the same name by the amazing Rick ooody.
You know that oathilda Savitch and her broken family can’t keep going on the way they are – that at some point grief has to give way to something more hopeful if the living are to stay that way. It’s just a matter of what exactly is going to stop the downward spiral – and where the broken-hearted survivors are going to go from there.
Actually, I’ve just watched a DVD on a similar subject – a Swedish film called Suddenly. Check it out if you find yourself twiddling your thumbs at the video store and don’t mind subtitles. It mines the same heart-wrenching territory as oathilda Savitch, although it lacks this wonderful book’s charm and bittersweet humour.