Ways to Live Forever
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- 45,00 kr
Publisher Description
"My name is Sam. I am eleven years old. I collect stories and fantastic facts. By the time you read this, I will probably be dead." Sam is dying of leukaemia. He hasn't got forever, so every minute counts. He wants the facts about UFOs and horror movies and airships and ghosts and scientists, and how it feels to kiss a girl. And, most importantly, he wants to know the facts about dying. Can Sam get answers to the questions that nobody will answer - and find a way to live a lifetime in the months that he has left? Winner of the Waterstone's Children's Book Prize 2007, this funny, powerful and uplifting novel is a startling look at life in the face of death. "A hugely impressive achievement... This is an elegant, intelligent, moving and sometimes even funny book." Mal Peet, The Guardian.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This year's answer to 2007's Before I Die, this first novel written by a 23-year-old Brit likewise features a young narrator with incurable cancer and, while it doesn't entirely escape the conventions of the dying-child novel, it skirts easy sentiment to confront the hard questions head-on, intelligently and realistically and with an enormous range of feeling. Sam, facing his third recurrence of leukemia at the age of 11, keeps a journal, and among his entries are facts, questions and lists: "Questions Nobody Answers No. 1 How do you know that you've died?"; "True facts about coffins"; "Why does God make kids get ill?" Sam starts out with a buddy, another terminally ill boy who shares Sam's sense of humor and who with Sam is taught by a visiting teacher ("No dying at the table, Felix," she tells him in the opening scene when he is mocking melodramatic portrayals of "the poor, frail child... struggling bravely"). How Sam and his family cope with Felix's death and Sam's own inevitable decline ultimately, with humor, grace and generosity of spirit will bring on tears; more impressively, it will also help readers address the hard questions for themselves. Ages 9 12.
