How I Saved My Father's Life (And Ruined Everything Else)
Acclaimed author Ann Hood brings Scholastic her first YA novel.\ A twelve year old girl's quest for faith and understanding, in the face of ballet, her parents' divorce, and a move to a new town.\ Madeline's struggle to understand the world around her will resonate with readers of all ages.
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Twelve-year-old Madeline believes she can perform miracles. And her biggest one to date is saving her father from an avalanche. But, unmiraculously, he divorces Madeline's mother after his recovery, writes a book about the avalanche, becomes a celebrity, and marries Ava Pomme, a renowned tart maker. When he leaves, Madeline is left with her mother, who is slowly coming undone; her hypochondriac little brother, who spends his days worrying about air-bag safety; a house that is falling apart around her; and no clue how to perform the miracle that will fix it all.Amidst ballet lessons, insufferable recipe experiments for her mother's Family magazine column, and a life-changing trip to Italy, Madeline learns the true meaning of faith-and family-in this moving novel by acclaimed author Ann Hood.Publishers WeeklyHood (The Knitting Circle; Comfort,Reviews, Feb. 25) may be most recently celebrated for her adult novel and her memoir about grief, but her first YA title is a pitch-perfect comedy. Her subject here is also painful-divorce-but the narrative voice is exquisitely if unwittingly funny while true to the perspective of a child. Eleven-year-old Madeline, who assures readers up front that she's "not even a religious person," wants to become a saint. Why? She believes that her praying has miraculously saved her father from an avalanche, and with one more miracle she can fix the unintended consequences: her father has subsequently divorced her mother, moved to Manhattan, married a chic pastry chef named Ava Pomme and fathered a baby. Hood takes no shortcuts with any of her characters, allowing them to withstand Madeline's scorn or adulation in all their complexity. Rarely has divorce been shown so astutely from a child's point of view. Ages 11-up. (Apr.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
\ Publishers WeeklyHood (The Knitting Circle; Comfort,Reviews, Feb. 25) may be most recently celebrated for her adult novel and her memoir about grief, but her first YA title is a pitch-perfect comedy. Her subject here is also painful-divorce-but the narrative voice is exquisitely if unwittingly funny while true to the perspective of a child. Eleven-year-old Madeline, who assures readers up front that she's "not even a religious person," wants to become a saint. Why? She believes that her praying has miraculously saved her father from an avalanche, and with one more miracle she can fix the unintended consequences: her father has subsequently divorced her mother, moved to Manhattan, married a chic pastry chef named Ava Pomme and fathered a baby. Hood takes no shortcuts with any of her characters, allowing them to withstand Madeline's scorn or adulation in all their complexity. Rarely has divorce been shown so astutely from a child's point of view. Ages 11-up. (Apr.)\ Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.\ \ \ \ \ Children's Literature\ - Paula McMillen\ Madeline Vandermeer was just barely 11 years old when she accomplished two miracles. The first was to move a glass of water without touching it. The second was to save her father's life when he was caught in an avalanche. Now, she feels she needs to make a third miracle happen because her father returned to his family only briefly before leaving them for a celebrity life, a new wife, and a baby on the way. Madeline is convinced her mother is to blame for the divorce. After all, she is so "ordinary," whereas Ava Pomme, the new stepmother, is so glamorous. Left in the falling-apart house that her mom cannot afford to remodel, Madeline and her younger brother are weekly subjected to their mother's culinary experiments which are the fodder for her food column in Family magazine. Madeline sees her mother's work as foolish and based on lies, since they are no longer the happy family of her dreams. Worse yet, when her stressed out mother withdraws Madeline from ballet school in Boston, an hour away, and puts her in a local class, she sees her chances of becoming a world-class ballerina slipping away. Then, the magazine offers to send the family on an all-expense-paid trip to Italy to write about traveling with children. Madeline, initially only interested in visiting reliquaries of various saints, has some perception-altering revelations of her own. This is a great book to offer tweens and teens facing divorce and new stepfamilies. The young protagonist exhibits all the wretched feelings and behaviors that accompany such significant losses but eventually comes to a balanced view of parents and the hard choices we all make when life is not perfect. Reviewer: Paula McMillen, Ph.D.\ \ \ School Library JournalGr 5-7- Madeline Vandermeer wants to become a saint. She's already performed two miracles (moving a glass without touching it and having a premonition of her father's avalanche accident), so she figures she's well on the way-even though she isn't Catholic. She begins attending mass regularly, reads up on the lives of saints, writes to the Pope, and practices suffering. The suffering part is easy: her parents have divorced, and she is no longer able to take ballet class in Boston, an hour's drive from her Providence, RI, home. Also, Madeline harbors anger toward her mother, believing that Dad left because Mom is not sophisticated and beautiful like his new wife, Ava Pomme. However, during a family trip to Italy, Madeline comes to appreciate her mother for being all the things Ava is not. Hood's book is scattered, with minor plotlines trailing throughout. Some are dropped and others solved rather abruptly, but the overall story of Madeline's attempt to reconstruct her life after divorce comes together as she reaches a place of understanding: "This wasn't the life I would have chosen for myself. But I saw that my choices lay ahead of me. In this matter, my parents had decided. They had fallen away from each other, and I would forever be somewhere stretched between them." Hopefully readers won't become lost in the inconsequential and miss the touching story of how one girl deals with the breakup of her family.-Heather E. Miller, Homewood Public Library, AL\ \ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsTwelve-year-old Madeline Vandermeer of Rhode Island just knows that she is destined to become Saint Madeline of Providence-after all, she has already performed two miracles, one of which she believes saved her father from an avalanche. However, shortly after her father's close call, Madeline's seemingly happy parents divorce. Deeply hurt by the separation, Madeline becomes increasingly determined to achieve sainthood and, even though she's not Catholic, begins attending church, writes the pope and makes a friend, who shares her religious fervor. Madeline's devotion to her faith is tempered by her passion for ballet, which helps ground the text and flesh out her character. Most striking is Madeline's rocky relationship with her mother, whom she blames completely for the divorce. Despite her striving for sainthood, the cruel thoughts and actions that Madeline points at her mother dominate, painting her as mean-spirited, until she begins to slowly suspect that she's blaming the wrong person. (Fiction. YA)\ \
