Sweethearts

Sweetheartsby Sara Zarr Little Brown & Co., 2008,217 pp., $16.99 Family/Relationships/Self-Discovery ISBN: 978-0-316-01455-7

Alternating between present-day life and flashbacks to a tragic and momentous day in her childhood, Sweethearts tells the story of Jenna Vaughn, a 17-year-old who reinvents herself from Jennifer Harris, the chubby, picked-on little girl, into a popular high school girl with friends and "the" boyfriend. But when her best and only friend from childhood, Cameron Quick, reappears, her life is thrown out of balance.

Sara Zarr captures the feelings of Jenna who, inside, is still the chubby little girl who secretly ate food to fill her emptiness, whose mother wasn't there for her, and whose only friend was a boy with an abusive home life. When Cameron returns, her insecurities return in full force. If he was alive, why didn't he contact her? And what does he want from her now?

Sweethearts is a book that is impossible to put down and that compels one to read until the bittersweet end.

Melanie Koss

Chicago, IL

Copyright Assembly on Literature for Adolescents -- National Council of Teachers of English Winter 2008
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