Not Quite a Stranger
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A girl discovers she has a half brother
Charlotte Flannigan (Tottie, for short) leads a conventional life in a conventional family. Her father is a well-respected pediatrician, her mother a popular newspaper columnist, and her younger brother a talkative but otherwise okay kid. But on an ordinary Saturday afternoon, Tottie's comfortable life is threatened when the doorbell rings. She answers it to find a teenage boy, who looks eerily like her father, standing there. A stranger, but not quite a stranger. His name is Zachary Pearce, and he is her father's - and not her mother's - son.
Told through the alternating perspectives of Tottie and Zach, Colby Rodowsky's novel explores the ramifications of a sudden change in the makeup of a family. Fear, resentment, desperation, and potential for love all surface in this honest and heartfelt story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like Rodowsky's The Turnabout Shop, this warmhearted novel traces a displaced orphan's adjustment to a new family. However, unlike its predecessor, this story alternates between two points of view, that of 17-year-old Zachary Pearce, who, after his mother's death, seeks out the father he never knew, and that of his 13-year-old half-sister, Tottie Flannigan, who learns of Zachary's existence only after he arrives unannounced at their door. Although Tottie's father, mother and seven-year-old brother all seem to welcome Zachary with open arms, underlying tensions in the household emerge as the two main characters narrate. In Zachary's eyes, the Flannigans, who invite him to live with them, are too good to be true. He keeps waiting for a bomb to drop. Tottie, on the other hand, would like a bomb to drop, to shake her parents back to their senses and realize how crazy it is to take in a virtual stranger. As Zachary settles in with the family, following his father's footsteps by enrolling in a prestigious boys' school, readers' empathies will extend to both the older teen and disgruntled Tottie, who can't get over the fact that her seemingly perfect father a pediatrician and the author of a parenting book had a child out of wedlock. Although the Flannigans, as Zachary observes, appear at first to be as plastic as the Leave It to Beaver family, they gain dimension as they begin to release locked-up feelings. As always, the author does a superb job of downplaying the melodrama of an extraordinary situation and evoking the emotions of ordinary adolescents in crisis. Ages 10-up.
