Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Jackie LOVES This Book!

Judy Lohden is your above-average sixteen-year-old—sarcastic and vulnerable, talented and uncertain, full of big dreams for a big future. With a singing voice that can shake an auditorium, she should be the star of Darcy Academy, the local performing arts high school. So why is a girl this promising hiding out in a seedy motel room on the edge of town?

The fact that the national media is on her trail after a controversy that might bring down the whole school could have something to do with it. And that scandal has something—but not everything—to do with the fact that Judy is three feet nine inches tall.

Rachel DeWoskin remembers everything about high school: the auditions (painful), the parents (hovering), the dissection projects (compelling), the friends (outcasts), the boys (crushable), and the girls (complicated), and she lays it all out with a wit and wistfulness that is half Holden Caulfield, half Lee Fiora, Prep’s ironic heroine. Big Girl Small is a scathingly funny and moving book about dreams and reality, at once light on its feet and unwaveringly serious.

Jackie says:
"I LOVED this book!  It's a new take of high school dramas of all sorts--the petty and the perverse.  It's written with a light hand, but strands of vulnerability woven around each and every character that make it an intriguing and multi-dimensional tale.  The main character, Judy, is a 16 year old Little Person (in this case, a dwarf) who has great artistic talent in singing, acting and writing.  She's won a scholarship to a fancy arts school and comes in with dreams of an amazing last two years of high school.  She makes friends, settles in to rehearsals and performing, and even meets an "average size" guy who seems to be becoming her boyfriend in a somewhat strange way.  But he has a secret, one that changes Judy's life forever and leaves her hiding from the world in a seedy hotel in another town.  I actually cried a few times while reading this book, and had a hard time putting it down.  It's well written and very relevant to the times today's teens find themselves in.  There is a lot of sexual content, so it's probably best for the 15 and up crowd, though honestly I feel it has a message that even younger teenagers can benefit from."

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