Marchetta, Melina. Saving Francesca

It always makes my nose wrinkle when an author has won a Family Therapy Award. It's the sort of thing that fairly reliably signals something maudlin or Uplifting.

It's Uplifting, but I like it enough so that I'll forgive it that much.

Francesca Spinelli, year 11 (grade 11 for us on the other side of the hemisphere, I'll presume) has a mother who's suddenly become seriously depressed--to the point of not getting out of bed, speaking, or eating. And she has just started at St. Sebastian's, a very nearly all-boys' school in Sydney, Australia, since her previous school only went up to year 10. She hates the juvenile frat-boy atmosphere, which has no doubt been made worse by the recent co-ed-ification of the school.

From there, it hits the necessary plot points: friendship, romance with the boy who's earmarked as Romantic Interest on page 15, trauma and recovery. Okay, I'll admit, I like my books to have a few more dinosaurs and explosions in them. It's a very quiet and somewhat predictable story, but for all that, not a bad one. The main story of the book is how Francesca, who's essentially sold her soul for popularity and suppressed the part of her that sang and danced in public, rediscovers herself again--and that part of the story is very well done, and rings true, and has more individuality than the boy-stuff or the depressed-mother-stuff. Like a lot of lit novels, it's better at the micro level than the macro level; there are all these scenes that I like individually, that are sweet or silly or that talk about what I felt at that age, and then I pull back from the book and get annoyed that it's obvious and dull. I think I will have to eventually get over my dislike for literary fiction, but for an example of the genre--it's actually a lot of fun.

What is it with all the trendy YA novels being written in present tense these days, anyway?

Marchetta, Melina. Saving Francesca. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.