Family Reunion
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
When the invitation to the Preffyn family reunion arrives interrupting a perfectly decent summer vacation, 15-year-old Shelley Wollcott is anything but enthusiastic. It’s not that Shelley has anything against her relatives, she just can’t stand it when they give her that “what a pity” look. It’s not her fault that her real mother walked out on the family or that her father has remarried yet again. With Dad away on business and her older sister visiting their mother in Paris, Shelley must face the “perfect” Preffyns’ reunion with only her prankster younger brother and her insecure new stepmother at her side. It’s an opportunity to uncover the family’s secrets, but Shelley isn’t sure whether, when she discovers the truth, she’ll laugh or cry.
In this funny and poignant novel by Caroline B. Cooney, Shelley learns to appreciate all the members of her unusual family—including herself!—in ways she never anticipated. And she discovers things are often not as perfect as they seem.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One can see where Cooney's story is going from its early pages: Shelley, who has been through her parents' divorce and their subsequent remarriages views another, non-divorced family as perfect, before discovering that no one configuration of people means ``family.'' But nothing else about the book is predictable. Shelley, her stepmother and embarrassingly obnoxious younger brother set off for a family reunion (with the ``perfect family'') in Iowa. Her father is on a business trip and her older sister is in Paris with their mother and stepfather. Afraid that she's about to meet her father's son by another woman, Shelley goes to the reunion full of expectations that mostly remain unfulfilled. Instead, she discovers the value of cousins and of imperfect family members, and witnesses her father's own coming to terms with his roots. Cooney sometimes second-guesses herself, introducing and retracting plot threads, not always to dramatic effect. But she tells her story with verve and instills in her characters realistic qualities to which readers will respond. Ages 12-up.
