Unraveling
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
THE SMART THING Is to Prepare for the Unexpected.
So reads the fortune cookie fortune that Amanda receives at the beginning of her family’s vacation to Florida. Amanda knows all about preparing for the unexpected—her mother, whom she calls The Captain, is always hard on Amanda, and it’s just when Amanda lets her guard down that the very worst comes through. Looking for acceptance, Amanda turns her attention to boys, and doing whatever she can to be popular at school. That includes making out with the gorgeous senior Rick in his car after school—even though he has a girlfriend. And when Rick offers her The Deal—a real, official date to the Homecoming in front of everyone, in exchange for her virginity—Amanda jumps at the chance. But no matter how you try to prepare for the unexpected, sometimes you can’t. Sharp, chatty, and brutally honest, this debut novel is compulsively readable and heartbreakingly real.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Baldini and Biederman make a powerful debut with this painfully realistic tale. Amanda Himmelfarb, 15, has good reason to feel rejected by her sniping, bitter mom, whom she's privately dubbed the Captain. Her dad, aka La La Man, and younger, seemingly perfect sister are of little help in Amanda's constant struggles to please. As Amanda narrates, the coauthors expertly calibrate the family dynamics, letting the audience see far in advance of Amanda herself why she sets herself up for rejection: in an early scene, a boy pressures her into giving him a blow job, then dumps her; later, the boy she likes at school fools around with her in secret while openly preserving his relationship with his girlfriend. When he trades Amanda a date to the homecoming dance in return for sex, the tension results from readers' certainty that she'll agree it's like watching a train wreck about to happen. For great stretches, the verisimilitude is almost heartbreaking; luckily, Amanda speaks with wit and not self-pity. The only false note is an overly dramatic, quasi-tidy resolution a forgivable flaw in an ambitious, timely first novel. Ages 14 up.
