Seventh-grade narrator Suzy Swanson will win readers' hearts as she silently struggles to come to terms with the death of her former best friend, Franny Jackson.
The fact that Franny drowned while on her summer vacation makes no sense to Suzy. Franny was a strong swimmer. Suzy met Franny when they both arrived for swimming lessons at age five. Franny could already swim underwater. Suzy toggles between her present--as a seventh-grader at Eugene Field Memorial Middle School--and her memories of meeting Franny, becoming best friends, and then it all going terribly awry as Franny develops a crush on Dylan Parker and starts sitting with Aubrey and Mollie at lunch, instead of with Suzy.
Debut author Ali Benjamin depicts the painful crumbling of Suzy's friendship with Franny, and her former best friend's escalating acts of cruelty. These incidents will hit home with readers because of their familiarity--not sitting at the lunch table as they always had, then making fun of the rituals they once shared, then shutting out Suzy entirely. It all comes to a head on the sixth-grade camping trip, when Suzy uses her eyes to plead with Franny to stop Dylan's torture of a frog, and Suzy sees there "something I've never seen before: a kind of deadness in your eyes."
Suzy is convinced that the Franny she remembers is in there somewhere, if she can only reawaken her. What she does to wake Franny up seems completely plausible in Suzy's mind--a mind obsessed with the friendship she has lost. But readers will see the larger picture; Franny has moved on from Suzy to boys and barrettes and "the right hair product." It is a year of a series of deaths for Suzy: the death of her parents' marriage, the death of her friendship with Franny, and, finally, the death of Franny herself. The author tells us these things early on, but it's the way Suzy insulates herself from these matters that will keep readers turning pages. Suzy moves from "constant-talking" to a selective muteness in the days following Franny's death. She feels certain that the Irukandji jellyfish is responsible for Franny's death. It's the only plausible explanation. In her pursuit to prove this, she finds a reason to keep going.
Benjamin shows readers that there are many ways to grieve, and, surrounded by people who love her, Suzy will get to the other side of her complex emotions. Suzy's ability to articulate the tectonic shifts in her world will help readers get through theirs, too. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness
Shelf Talker: Seventh-grade narrator Suzy Swanson will win readers' hearts as she silently struggles to come to terms with her complex emotions over the death of her former best friend.