Don't Fail Me Now
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the author of Like No Other, the novel Entertainment Weekly calls "One of the most poignant and star-crossed love stories since The Fault in Our Stars": What if the last hope to save your family is the person who broke it up to begin with?
"Fans of John Green, Rainbow Rowell, and Sharon Flake will find much to love in [Don't Fail Me Now]."
--School Library Journal
Michelle and her little siblings Cass and Denny are African-American and living on the poverty line in urban Baltimore, struggling to keep it together with their mom in jail and only Michelle’s part-time job at the Taco Bell to sustain them.
Leah and her stepbrother Tim are white and middle class from suburban Maryland, with few worries beyond winning lacrosse games and getting college applications in on time.
Michelle and Leah only have one thing in common: Buck Devereaux, the biological father who abandoned them when they were little.
After news trickles back to them that Buck is dying, they make the uneasy decision to drive across country to his hospice in California. Leah hopes for closure; Michelle just wants to give him a piece of her mind.
Five people in a failing, old station wagon, living off free samples at food courts across America, and the most pressing question on Michelle’s mind is: Who will break down first--herself or the car? All the signs tell her they won’t make it. But Michelle has heard that her whole life, and it’s never stopped her before....
Una LaMarche triumphs once again with this rare and compassionate look at how racial and social privilege affects one family in crisis in both subtle and astonishing ways.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After Michelle's drug-addicted mother is arrested, 17-year-old Michelle is left to fend for her two younger siblings. Again. With virtually no one to help them, Michelle (who is half-black) feels lost until her previously unknown (and "the-color-of-tracing-paper white") half-sister, Leah, shows up with her stepbrother, Tim. Buck Devereaux the long-absent father that Michelle, her siblings, and Leah all share is dying, and he wants to see them. After some persuasion, all five step-siblings pile into Michelle's broken-down station wagon to travel from Baltimore to California. Buck's abandonment permeates the complicated getting-to-know-you conversations that happen along the way, helping everyone bond them as they face major obstacles on the road. LaMarche (Like No Other) spends substantial time setting up Michelle's family's difficulties, so the story initially stalls before the road trip gets underway. Michelle's narration can be surprisingly formal ("I'd like to think that I'm owed this one transgression after so many years of playing by my mom's hypocritical rules, especially since my motives are mostly pure"), but her budding relationship with Tim adds a sweet-natured romantic dimension to this sibling-centered story. Ages 12 up.
