The Long Way Home – by Barbara Cohen Laatste Kans

Beschrijving

The Long Way Home

Sally’s relationship with an elderly bus driver who recites Shakespeare stories helps her to cope with the problems of her mother’s cancer and being separated from her twin sister at summer camp.

Grade Level: 4 – 6

From School Library Journal:
Eleven-year-old twins Sally and Emily have grown apart during the summer of their mother’s chemotherapy after a mastectomy. Because the family cannot take their annual beach vacation, the girls are sent to day camp where they are assigned to different groups.
Sally, from whose point of view the story is told, finds this to be only one of the upsetting aspects of her summer. She is angry with her family, critical of her group, and deliberately unpleasant until she is befriended by Claire, a former actress who drives the camp bus.

Cohen has done a fine job of portraying the confusion of a preadolescent who is trying to deal with her anger and fear within a family who love one another but are afraid to talk about cancer. Sally’s gradual understanding of herself and her sister’s shared anxieties as she works with her camp group leads to a reconciliation with her parents and a hopeful ending. This story may remind readers of Barbara Girion’s A Tangle of Roots (Putnam, 1985), in which a mother’s illness and death also threaten to destroy a close-knit Jewish family. But rather than focus on death, Cohen has written about a family who will likely survive both a mother’s illness and the terrible fear it brings to those close to her. –Barbara Chatton, College of Education, University of Wyoming, Laramie

Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

For further NOTES See also the BACK of the book!