Moon, Sarah Sparrow

Moon, Sarah   Sparrow         Scholastic/Arthur Levine     2017   264p   18.99  978-1-338-03258-1            ms/hs Realistic Fiction          VG-BN 
To escape her social ineptness, Sparrow, tunes out and flies.  The story is how she learns to cope and improves very slowly with the help of a therapist.  About an eighth grader, but psychologically very deep.  Grade 7 up.          
Sparrow does not have friends and really doesn’t know how to make friends.  To escape the stress of life, she flies.  She sees birds and takes off with them in flight.  One day at school she is on the roof and it is assumed she wanted to jump.  After a stay in the hospital, she is sent home on the condition that she meet with a therapist.  Sparrow is very slow to open up at all (90 pages). The therapist is the most patient person on the planet.  Eventually Sparrow is open enough to try a camp for rock musicians.  Sparrow learns, among other things, that other girls have problems too, but they learn how to deal with them.
   The writing is in the first person so the reader really knows what Sparrow is thinking.  The beginning lets the reader think that Sparrow is weird.  As the story progresses the reader comes to sympathize with her and better understand her.  The triumph Sparrow experiences at the end makes the whole story worthwhile.
   Whereas every teenage girl feels disconnected at times in their teen years, it takes a mature reader to handle Sparrow’s thinking.  It would give hope to others feeling isolated, but some would not be able to cope with all the thoughts of Sparrow.                                    Theal(1), Joan