Audacious
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
Sixteen-year-old Raphaelle says the wrong thing, antagonizes the wrong people and has the wrong attitude.
She can't do anything right except draw, but she draws the wrong pictures. When her father moves the family to a small prairie city, Raphaelle wants to make a new start. Reborn as "Ella," she tries to fit in at her new school. She's drawn to Samir, a Muslim boy in her art class, and expresses her confused feelings in explicit art. When a classmate texts a photo of Ella's art to a younger friend, the fallout spreads throughout Ella's life, threatening to destroy her already-fragile family. Told entirely in verse, Audacious is a brave, funny and hard-hitting portrait of a girl who embodies the word audacity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fans of Ellen Hopkins and Sonya Sones's novels in verse will delight in Prendergast's rich, riveting story, first in a planned duo. Just before Ella's junior year, her family moves to escape their problems her mother's grief over the death of her baby, younger sister Kayli's learning difficulties, Ella's victimization by school bullies, and her father's unwillingness to face any of it only to continue to wrestle with the same things. Ella falls for a Palestinian classmate, Samir, bringing up questions of identity and faith for both. Samir and Ella create controversial works for the student art show, and Samir's daring statement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Ella's explicit portrayal of womanhood land them in serious, but believable trouble. While the thread about Ella's bullying and her desire to act out is weakly explained, Prendergast demonstrates a powerful understanding of the adolescent search for identity, and her writing uses the verse format to great effect, with an honest teenage voice, a willingness to play with poetic form, and an intensity that arises through the condensed language. Ages 12 up.
