The Decoding of Lana Morris - Hardcover

McNeal, Laura; McNeal, Tom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375831061 ISBN 13: 9780375831065

Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2007

Synopsis

A Kirkus Reviews Best Young Adult Book of the Year
A New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age

Sixteen-year-old Lana Morris wishes her life were different: her Ice Queen of a foster mother won't leave her alone, and she has no friends but the other foster kids she takes care of.

Then she stumbles into a mysterious antique shop and trades her most valued possession for a single box of drawing paper: thirteen thick, blank pages, like thirteen wishes waiting to be made. Suddenly, impossibly, it seems Lana might actually have the power to change things. But wishing isn't always as harmless as it seems...

About this title

About the Author

Laura and Tom McNeal, winners of the PEN Center USA Literary Book Award for Zipped and the California Book Award for Crooked, live with their two young sons in Southern California.

Reviews

Grade 8 Up—Lana Morris, 16, is the only non-"Snick" in a Nebraska foster home. "Snicks" are her neglectful foster mother's term for special-needs kids (SNKs). Lana is enormously lonely; kids in town are downright cruel to her, her foster mother is jealous and inattentive, and her foster father is too attentive (he and Lana share an attraction and, at one point, a kiss). Her only support comes from the mildly kind boy next door. Lana is often left in charge of the other children and has to cope as best she can with rough, complicated situations. She buys a drawing kit in an antique store and finds that anything she sketches comes to be. This is powerful stuff, and Lana learns quickly that you have to be careful what you wish for. She tries to do right, and things point to a happy ending, but the road there is very twisty. The McNeals have interesting turns of phrase and their language can be very evocative, but sometimes their characters have wisdom well beyond their years. The novel has too many issues piled on top of one another—the lives of foster children, coming of age, forbidden love, magic, self-reliance, first love, trusting others. Still, the writing is lovely and the characters are real people who elicit genuine feelings from readers. Give this story to your more mature readers who want some heft to their magical realism stories.—Geri Diorio, The Ridgefield Library, CT
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In this suburban Cinderella story, a wicked foster mother named Veronica rules 16-year-old Lana Morris' life. Lana spends her time carrying out Veronica's endless orders, basking in her handsome stepfather Whit's inappropriate yet flattering attention, or caring for four special needs kids, or "Snicks," as Veronica callously calls them. Lana's salvation arrives in the form of a thrift store drawing kit. Whatever she draws on the old paper seems to materialize; likewise, whatever she erases disappears. But Lana can't always control the drawings' outcomes, and soon she is in a terrible bind as she tries to save herself and the Snicks from the results of wishes gone awry. The authors of Crooked (1999), Zipped(2002), and Crushed (2005) offer up yet another complex and richly characterized story. What is different here is the shining thread of magical realism woven throughout, illuminating the authors' familiar yet well-wrought themes of betrayal, disillusionment, and hope. Jennifer Hubert
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER ONE

Nebraska, June, the sky white with heat.

The dust devil begins with a pocket of unstable air where a farmer’s field of irrigated beans meets the heated asphalt of Highway 20, sending up a sudden rush of warm air that swirls and stretches higher, increasing speed. The twisting funnel of dirt and debris moves east through fields of alfalfa and wheat and corn toward the town of Two Rivers, where, in a two-storied foster home, a girl named Lana Morris lives.

Lana is sixteen and slim, with watchful dark eyes, brown hair that falls in straight lines down her long back, and a slot between her two front teeth that was once called her most charming feature by one of the least reliable in her mother’s long line of unreliable boyfriends. He said she was pretty, too, but the truth is Lana doesn’t think anything about herself is charming or pretty, only that the slot between her front teeth is the exact thickness of a dime, something she learned by trial and error.

Slipped into the crease behind Lana’s left ear, where some people might store a pencil or even a cigarette, you will normally find a tightly rolled two-dollar bill. With use and with time, this bill has been worn soft as cloth. Lana believes the bill was left to her by her father, believes that by unrolling it and holding it flat in her hand, she can sometimes feel the presence of the person he must have been. Lana has always believed in things. Fortune cookies. Horoscopes. That one of these days her mother (whereabouts unknown) would stop drinking, get a steady job, and buy them a little house somewhere. That her father, before he died, was nicer and less foolish than people said he was.

Lana stares down at her open hand with mild surprise. A minute before, she’d been drawing on a yellow legal pad, and now, without remembering doing it, she’s smoothing the two-dollar bill across the flat of her palm.

Lana rolls and fastens the bill, then tucks it behind her ear. Today will be okay, she thinks, if I can just get out of the house.

Always a big if.

It’s Saturday morning, for one thing. School is out for the summer. Whit Winters, her foster father, is upstairs asleep. His wife, Veronica, is in the backyard hanging sheets. Lana makes a point of being where Veronica isn’t, so she’s sneaked out to the front porch and sits sketching on a yellow legal tablet and eating Froot Loops from a box with a foster girl named Tilly, who is also sixteen. With her curly brown hair, green eyes, and round body, Tilly looks almost normal, but she isn’t.

“Look, Lana!” Tilly says, and Lana looks. Tilly holds open her pudgy hand to display a dozen or so Froot Loops, all pink. “Look! Look!”

“Pink is definitely your favorite,” Lana says.

Tilly says seriously, “Pinkies are better than yellows, Lana. You bet.”

They both fall quiet in the thick heat. Lana goes back to sketching Whit Winters’s face from memory. She can do his wavy hair, and she’s never had trouble with his eyes, but there’s something wrong with the chin, and if the chin’s wrong, everything’s wrong. He looks sharp and bony instead of smooth and boyish. She erases quickly, whisks the pink rubbery dust away with the side of her hand, and starts again.

Cicadas are whirring in the cottonwood, and a crow descends on the front lawn. Lana, lost again in her drawing, presumes this is a Saturday morning like any other Saturday morning, but in this she is wrong.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375831061
• ISBN 13: 9780375831065
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304