Life As It Comes – Anne-Laure Bondoux

Life As It Comes: “After their parents are killed in a car accident, sisters Mado, fifteen, and Patty, twenty, try to cope, but when the irresponsible and impulsive Patty gets pregnant and expects Mado to take charge of everything, life becomes increasingly difficult.”

Because this book was translated from the French and is set in Europe, it has some cultural and societal differences from our own.  If you had been at Tires Plus on Saturday morning you would have seen me reading snatches of the book to my mother and talking about the rest stops with nursery nooks.  I am used to seeing a changing table in the bathroom, not a separate room to take care of the child.

One of the great things about reading fiction is seeing how other people live, or how other people might live.  I like reading about people in different areas of the country and in different areas of the world.  It is a lot less expensive then airfare – all it costs is my library card.

Stuff: The Life of a Cool Demented Dude – Jeremy Strong

Here is a funny boy coming of age book, interspersed with drawings and a serial comic strip.

Life is rough when your dad’s girlfriend moves into the house with her teenage daughter who happens to be the same age that you are. What is almost worse is the enormous angora rabbit that hates men. Don’t expect to walk through the house unscathed. There is also a bit about how not to prepare a bubble bath. I couldn’t help but laugh at the result.

Here is the book’s summery, “Fourteen-year-old Simon, known as Stuff, struggles with his new stepfamily, tries to avoid a giant attack rabbit, hopes to break up with his girlfriend and connect with a new one, and creates cartoons of “Punykid’s battle with drooling dorkoids.”"

Side Effects – Amy Goldman Koss

Some people really like reading books by Lurlene McDaniel where a teen gets cancer, learns something moving about life, and then dies. I prefer when the teen lives.

The book Side Effects tells the reader first thing that Izzy is going to live. Even the summery states, “Everything changes for Isabelle, not quite fifteen, when she is diagnosed with lymphoma–but eventually she survives and even thrives.”

Not that the road to survival is pretty.  How would you react if you had cancer, or your best friend did?