Nobel Genes
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
It's tough to measure up to your parents' expectations. Imagine how much harder it would be if your mother told you that your biological father—whom you'd never met—was a Nobel prize-winning genius? NOBEL GENES is the story of just such a boy. His life consists of a series of halves; his genes are half from a donor bank that featured Nobel winners. After years of testing and tutoring, he only lives up to his mother's expectations halfway. He spends half his time sharing in his mother’s manic ups and the other half in her depressive downs. And he always has to be half-awake in the middle of the night so that when his mother wakes up and plays with her pills, he can count them and make sure the proper amount are still there before he goes to sleep.
Perhaps him being a “Nobel son” is a dream. Or a hope. Or a delusion. No matter what it is to his mother, it becomes devastation when he learns that his genius history is a lie. And once the truth is revealed, there is no going back. Even when he thought he discovered the most important truth, in his dreams, he finds one answer that he never imagined. Does it matter who you come from? Or are we all just made from dust?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The unnamed adolescent narrator of this skillful, deeply disconcerting tale lives in a state of constant high-level stress. His mother is manic-depressive and only intermittently in touch with reality. She periodically overdoses on her medications, and to avoid being carted off to a foster home, the boy must claim that their tenant is a friend of the family. He gets solid grades, but his life is made even more difficult because his mother insists that she wanted a genius baby, so she visited a special sperm bank, to buy me genes from a Nobel Prize winner. She has also told her son that his grandparents are dead and that he has no other living relatives. Then, when it seems that things couldn t get more chaotic, he discovers evidence that everything his mother has told him is a lie. Michaels (The Reminder) makes effective use of first-person narration to give readers a highly believable protagonist and a riveting, from-the-trenches look at what it is like to live with a parent who suffers from a serious mental illness. Ages 12 up.
