The Remarkable Journey of Charlie Price
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A heartfelt, beautifully written novel of love, loss, and math—perfect for fans of Rebecca Stead and Sharon M. Draper. This "tangible allegory of grief through the eyes of a struggling 12-year-old boy" has been cited by Brightly.com as a book about sadness and grief that will help support kids and foster conversation.
Ever since twelve-year-old Charlie Price's mom died, he feels like his world has been split into two parts. Before included stargazing and Mathletes and Saturday scavenger hunts with his family. After means a dad who's completely checked out, comically bad dinners, and grief group that's anything but helpful. It seems like losing Mom meant losing everything else he loved, too.
Just when Charlie thinks things can't get any worse, his sister, Imogen, starts acting erratically—missing school and making up lies about their mother. But everything changes when one day he follows her down a secret passageway in the middle of her bedroom and sees for himself.
Imogen has found a parallel world where Mom is alive!
There's hot cocoa and Scrabble and scavenger hunts again and everything is perfect . . . at first. But something doesn't feel right. Whenever Charlie returns to the real world, things are different, and not in a good way. And Imogen wants to spend more and more time on the other side. It's almost as if she wants to leave the real world for good. If Charlie doesn't uncover the truth, he could lose himself, the true memory of their mother, and Imogen . . . forever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Maschari makes her debut with a well-conceived but uneven fantasy, in which 12-year-old Charlie and his younger sister, Imogen, explore a magical, dangerous parallel universe after the death of their mother. Mature, responsible, and a lover of the reliability of math, Charlie thinks in terms of puzzles and problems, and strives to care for his sister, including poignantly and comically failing to recreate their mother's spaghetti sauce. The siblings' grief seems momentarily lessened when Imogen shows Charlie a door under her bed that leads to a facsimile of their home, where their mother eagerly recreates cherished moments from their time together. However, these memories disappear after each visit, and the seductive appeal of this other world becomes increasingly sinister as the children begin to lose interest in the real world. Charlie and Imogen's emotional turmoil is at times heavy-handed, particularly in Charlie's grief group sessions, and the fantasy realm somewhat sketchily conveyed. Still, Maschari delivers a tense allegory about finding the balance between remembering and moving on. Ages 8 12.
