Being Bindy
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
What happens when your worst friend, who used to be your best friend, threatens to become your sister?
I'd never sat on my own in the schoolyard before. Everywhere I looked I saw smirking faces, people whispering to each other, or whistling. Janey wouldn't even look at me. I overheard one of the others say, 'I don't know why you were ever friends with her,' to which she replied,' I know. She's just so bleagh.'
That was the moment. It was officially TWDOML - The Worst Day of My Life.
Janey narrowed her eyes. 'Don't you understand anything? When adults Go Out, it's not like when we do it. Before too long they'll want to move in together and where will they live? What if they get married? We'll be sisters.'
Bindy faces some tough decisions, finding her own way among schoolmates, friends, ex-friends, boys and parents in this funny, searching novel from the author of Finding Grace and Walking Naked.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this intermittently poignant and humorous book, Australian author Brugman (Finding Grace) introduces a feisty heroine whose life is in anxiety-inducing flux. Bindy's longtime best friend Janey drops her for a mean-spirited, clothes- and boy-crazy classmate, with whom she teams up to humiliate the narrator in front of the entire school. When Janey does deign to come to Bindy's house, she prefers hanging out with Bindy's older brother, Kyle. Bindy's good-natured father, with whom she and Kyle live, begins courting Janey's big-hearted mother, making Bindy fear that she might eventually have to share a bedroom with her ex-pal. Meanwhile, James, a fellow eighth-grader, endearingly and clumsily jockeys to become more than friends. One of the book's many strengths lies in the parallels it draws between the adult and adolescent dating rituals. When James attempts to kiss Bindy, she protests that she doesn't know him well enough to determine whether they even have anything in common never mind to kiss him. To her earnest would-be suitor, that isn't a problem: "If we're kissing, then we don't have to talk." Bindy's self-absorbed mother, who didn't even bother to tell her children that their grandmother died, has a live-in beau. Their mother's emotional disconnect leads to the novel's most heartbreaking scenes, including one in which Bindy's mother snaps, "What do you want from me?" and Bindy blurts, "I want you to love me." Both the adult and teenage characters come across as fully formed, with both faults and strengths. Ages 12-up.
