My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2012 Branford Boase Award, this is Annabel Pitcher's stunning debut about ten-year-old Jamie, and the way his life and his family are shaped by the sister in an urn on the mantelpiece.
Five years ago, Jamie's sister, Rose, was blown up by a terrorist bomb. His family is torn apart by their grief. His mum runs away. His dad turns to drink and hate. Rose's surviving twin sister Jasmine stops eating, gets piercings and dyes her hair pink - anything to look different to her twin. But Jamie hasn't cried in all that time. To him, Rose is just a distant memory.
Jamie is far more interested in his cat, Roger, his Spiderman T-shirt, and his deep longing and unshakeable belief that his Mum will come back to the family she walked out on months ago.
But moving away for a Fresh New Start introduces Jamie to something else very interesting - a girl named Sunya. Sunya is bright, exciting and fun, and the one person at school he can call a friend. But how far can this new friendship grow when Jamie is desperate that his dad doesn't find out?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this powerfully honest, quirkily humorous debut novel, first published in the U.K., 10-year-old narrator Jamie and his family are still dealing with his sister Rose's death in a terrorist bombing five years earlier. After Rose's twin, Jas, stakes her independence by dying her hair pink on her 15th birthday, the family falls apart their mother runs off with another man, and their alcoholic father moves from London to the Lake District with the children, where he lavishes attention on Rose's urn. (In one of many heartbreaking details, Rose's parents cremated part of their daughter's remains and buried the rest, a devastating metaphor for the family's ongoing inability to handle the tragedy.) Jamie's pivotal friendship with a Muslim girl, Sunya, is a standout. Pitcher tackles grief, prejudice, religion, bullying, and familial instability through the unsentimental voice of a boy who loves Spider-Man and Manchester United, misses his mother, and truth be told doesn't remember his dead sister all that well. The adults in Pitcher's story may be a mess, but the kids are all right. Ages 12 up.
