Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"School is St. Sebastian's in the city. It's a predominately all-boys' school that has opened its doors to girls in Year Eleven for the first time ever. My old school, St. Stella's, only goes to Year Ten and most of my friends now go to Pius Senior College, but my mother wouldn't allow it because she says the girls there leave with limited options and she didn't bring me up to have limitations placed upon me. If you know my mother, you'll sense there's an irony there, based on the fact that she is the Queen of Limitation Placers in my life. My brother, Luca, is Year Five at Sebastian's so my mother figured it would be convenient for all of us in the long run and my dad goes along with it because no one in my family has ever pretended that my mother doesn't make all the decisions."

Francesca Spinelli's mother, Mia, has always been a force to be reckoned with. She's a university lecturer in Communications who's accumulated a bunch of degrees as well as an equally impressive collection of expectations for her teenaged daughter:

"My mother forced me to take drama. 'You'll be in your element,' she said.
" 'She's shy,' my father tried to explain.
" 'Yes, in her left toe she's shy. She's just lazy. That's her problem. She's too busy worrying about what her friends--'
" 'I don't care what my friends think.'
" 'You care what they'll do when they remember that you're the one with personality.'
" 'Is it okay if I have a say over what I want?' I asked.
" 'That's the problem, Frankie. Once you start hanging out with them, they don't give you a say.'
" 'You just want me to be like you,' I shouted.
" 'You are like me. Get used to it,' she shouted back.
"My father would go around and shut all the windows in the kitchen so the neighbors couldn't hear us shouting, but Mia and I would go at it until I backed down or my dad would say, 'Mia, she's a kid. Couldn't you let her win for once?'
"But it was never in Mia's makeup to back down.
" 'Is that what you want, Frankie? That I let you win?'
"Yes, I'd want to scream. Just once, let me win.
"We'd go to bed furious with each other and then she'd wake me in the middle of the night and come and lie on my bed and we'd talk for hours, about nothing and everything and she'd let me touch the scars on her stomach; the scars from where they cut me out of her."

But something has happened to Mia, who unexpectedly fails to get up one morning.

"Luca and I wait for my dad at the front door because my mother never stays in bed, even if she has a temperature over 104 degrees. But today the Mia we all know disappears and she becomes someone with nothing to say.
"Someone a bit like me."

Morning after morning thereafter, as Francesca heads out to face her classes, her friends, and the complications that arise from being one of thirty girls in a school with 750 guys, Mia remains shut up in her bedroom. Her dad, "Bob the Builder," a modest and content guy who got to marry his childhood sweetheart, works to neatly plaster over the problem.

Meanwhile, as the rising tides of crisis come crashing in on her family, Francesca's suddenly playing catch-me-if-you-can with the undertow of her hormones.

"Mia's everything has consumed us all our lives and now Mia's nothing is consuming us as well."

Francesca Spinelli's story is so intimate, so emotionally revealing that it sometimes takes on an almost voyeuristic quality.

"We watch in silence, but I look at the others' faces. All of them glued to the screen, a dreamy look on their faces. A hint of a smile on their lips. A sense of hope. They're all the same. Cynical Tara, couldn't-give-a-shit Siobhan, romantic Justine. "And I want to cry. Because my face looks just like theirs and I haven't felt like anyone else since I was in Year Seven and Siobhan Sullivan and I did the Macarena in the foyer of the chapel and got lunchtime detention for a week.
"Justine catches me looking and she smiles, and with tears in my eyes I smile back."

Searching to find her own voice, while groping for some key that might help lead her mother back from the abyss, Francesca Spinelli is one heck of a character in one masterfully written book. Turning on a dime, from the emotional, to the revealing, to the laugh-out-loud hilarious, SAVING FRANCESCA is a book that is not to be missed.

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com