Love and Other Four-Letter Words - Hardcover

Mackler, Carolyn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385327439 ISBN 13: 9780385327435

Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 2000

Synopsis

With her parents splitting up, 16-year-old Sammie Davis may not want to feel a thing, but feelings happen. For starters, she's plenty angry. Her dad's leaving their upstate New York home and moving clear across the country. Her mom's packing them up and relocating to New York City. And Sammie has no say about any of it.

Overnight Sammie is forced to deal with change. And one change spawns another: roles get reversed, old and new friendships are tested, and sexual feelings awaken. It's a scary time. But as Sammie realizes that things can't stay the same forever, that even the people she loves and trusts the most can disappoint her, she begins to accept that change isn't always bad. It's how you cope, jumbled feelings and all, that counts. And as she copes, Sammie's sense of self emerges proud and strong.

About this title

About the Author

Carolyn Mackler has written feature articles for Ms., Jump, and The Los Angeles Times. This is her first novel.

From the Inside Flap

ents splitting up, 16-year-old Sammie Davis may not want to feel a thing, but feelings happen. For starters, she's plenty angry. Her dad's leaving their upstate New York home and moving clear across the country. Her mom's packing them up and relocating to New York City. And Sammie has no say about any of it.

Overnight Sammie is forced to deal with change. And one change spawns another: roles get reversed, old and new friendships are tested, and sexual feelings awaken. It's a scary time. But as Sammie realizes that things can't stay the same forever, that even the people she loves and trusts the most can disappoint her, she begins to accept that change isn't always bad. It's how you cope, jumbled feelings and all, that counts. And as she copes, Sammie's sense of self emerges proud and strong.

Reviews

Grade 7-10-Called a "hippie-chick" by her best friend Kitty, Sammie Davis strums folk songs on her guitar instead of joining life in the fast lane. Aside from the changes in her developing body, the 16-year-old's life has been relatively uneventful until she learns that her artist mother and college-professor father are separating. Feeling angry and betrayed, Sammie leaves Kitty and her upstate home for a cramped New York City apartment with her mom. Despite the stressful situation, there is a lighthearted element to the novel that keeps the mood balanced. Insightful and intelligent, the teen finds herself coping with the changes better than her emotionally fragile mother. Sammie's humor shines through, especially when she's with her slobbery dog, Moxie. She begins to primp, donning a lacy camisole and a spritz of vanilla musk for "Elevator Duty," a daily routine in the hope of a chance meeting with her good-looking neighbor. Finding a fellow dog-walker and ally named Phoebe, Sammie gains confidence in her new surroundings and ultimately finds the courage to tell her father how she feels. The author uses actual locations from the upstate New York area around Cornell University and from New York City, adding to the realism of the story. Teens will relate to the common themes of divorce and awakening sexuality and will enjoy this Birkenstock-wearing heroine.
Vicki Reutter, Cazenovia High School, NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Though first-time novelist Mackler creates a sympathetic 16-year-old narrator filled with realistic anxieties, her dependence on familiar themes and plot development, plus heavy-handed pop culture references, makes for a lukewarm read. When Sammie's parents decide on a trial separation, she calls it "the obliteration of the belief that Mom and Dad were the 7th Heaven,we-have-problems-yet-we-gleefully-work-through-them type of parents." Her Cornell professor father heads off on sabbatical in California, while her mother, a stifled artist, yanks Sammie with her from Ithaca to New York City. The protagonist must deal with adjusting to a new city, a depressed mother who can't get out of bed, and only seems to manage monosyllabic responses to her father's phone conversations. When her narcissistic best friend, Kitty, comes to visit, they fight and Kitty leaves in a huff citing " irreconcilable differences." Sammie finds support in a new bond with Phoebe, an offbeat dog lover, and Eli, the hippie son of her mother's college roommate. Readers will relate to Sammie's internalized self-loathing; she's self-conscious about everything from her name, to her over-developed figure, to her only-been-kissed-once status. But they will likely predict the exact moment when Sammie and Eli will share their first kiss and when her father will finally reappear to sort out built-up tensions. Ages 12-up. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Like Phyllis Naylor's Alice and many other teenage girls in contemporary coming-of-age books, the 16-year-old narrator in this funny first novel is frank, awkward, "absolutely, completely average," and trying desperately to make sense of family, friendship, romance, and sex. Sammie's parents are having a trial separation. Her dad is gone, and she's left trying to care for her mom, who has moved them to New York City and can't cope at all. Sammie's best friend, beautiful, self-centered Kitty, talks all the time about sex with her boyfriend (including discussion of responsible contraception), but Sammie's worries are about her body image (especially her big breasts), and at parties she just ends up in a corner sipping lukewarm beer. The ending is happy: Mom and Dad are doing better, Sammie finds a new best friend, and there's romance (just kissing, so far) with a nice awkward "crunchy granola" guy. The nostalgia for the Beatles and Dylan is a bit overdone, but Mackler gets the contemporary scene with humor and realism. Many teens will read this for the facts about sex and growing up as well as the story. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Let's say someone had waltzed up to me six months ago and asked for my definition of love. I wasn't so naive at fifteen and a half to presume that love, or luv--as my best friend, Kitty, always ends her e-mails--only applies to sex-crazed teenagers, pressed against lockers, feverishly grinding groins in between classes. I'd probably have rambled on about the bond between mothers and fathers, parents and children. No doubt I would have sprinkled in choice phrases like "unconditional support," "mutual respect," and "considering the other person's feelings."

Pull me aside now and quiz me about those same four letters, and I'd blankly stare at you, my jaw ajar, like those guys who sat behind me in biology all year. Kitty would say I'm jaded. I would say that's a major understatement, seeing how my entire life has been blown to smithereens. Unconditional support has gone the way of the pterodactyl. Mutual respect? Only exists in the pages of the self-help books on Mom's bedside table. And my feelings definitely weren't being considered when Dad dropped the bombshell on that Sunday afternoon in early May.

I'd just returned from sleeping over at Kitty's, where we pulled an all-nighter because her boyfriend, Jack, called from his cell phone at three a.m. to report that he and two friends were on her back porch. Kitty had answered on the second ring, before her parents woke up, so we slipped into sweats and sneaked out the sliding glass doors. They were all wasted; I could smell it on their breath. And moments after Kitty and Jack disappeared into the pool shed, both guys conked out on reclining chairs, a gesture I tried not to take personally. I almost crept back to Kitty's room, but then I remembered an article I once read about an inebriated frat boy choking to death on his own puke. So I held a vigil until pinkish light accented the sky and the luvers reappeared on the deck: Jack's T-shirt inside out, three nickel-sized hickeys dotting Kitty's neck.

By the time I got home the next afternoon, my eyelids were drooping and my throat felt scratchy and dry. All I wanted to do was take a hot shower and burrow under my covers, but an eerie stillness permeated the house.

"Mom's in bed with a migraine," Dad reported in a hushed tone, pressing his outstretched pointer finger against his lips, steering me into the family room for A Discussion.

As I perched on the edge of our leather recliner, I tugged at the frayed strings on my cutoff jean shorts. Upon retrieving them from a bottom drawer on Friday afternoon, I'd discovered to my displeasure that they were snugger than last summer.

"Sammie." He paused. "Mom and I have been talking a lot these past few weeks. . . ."

Dad's voice trailed off. I noticed that the creases that have been cutting into his cheeks all spring were obscured by a weekend's buildup of stubble.

". . . And we've decided to get a trial separation."

Trial separation. The term hung in the air between us, like humidity before a thunderstorm. I began wrapping a thread from my shorts around my finger.

"What about our plan to go to California next year?" I asked. Dad is an English professor at Cornell, and Mom and I were joining him on his sabbatical to Stanford at the end of June. Aunt Jayne, Dad's younger sister, just sent a photo of the half-of-a-house she'd found for us in Palo Alto.

Dad began gnawing his fingernails, a habit he kicked five years ago, in solidarity with Mom, who was becoming a vegetarian because of her high cholesterol.

After a long silence, Dad somberly replied, "I'm going out there alone after all."

My face froze. Alone? Maybe he means alone, as in alone without Mom, as in alone with me. That had to be it. It's no secret that Dad and I are close, much closer than I am to Mom.

If the trial separation announcement was an atomic bomb, an obliteration of the belief that Mom and Dad were the 7th Heaven, we-have-problems-yet-we-gleefully-work-them-through type of parents, what was about to come was nuclear devastation. Armageddon. To quote that REM song, "the end of the world as we know it."

Dad got up from the couch, affixed his arm around my shoulders and delivered the final blow: "I'm sorry . . . it's just something I have to do."

I was stunned. Utterly, completely stunned. So stunned I couldn't speak, even though I was aching to scream, to rant, to demand an explanation for how he could desert me like this. All I could do was repeat, over and over in my head: Don't feel a thing. Don't feel a thing. Don't feel a thing.

It was only as I wriggled away from Dad's arm that I noticed my finger was red and bulging. I'd twisted the thread so tightly it had cut off the circulation. Yet still, as I unwound the tourniquet to discover purplish grooves in my skin, I didn't feel a thing.



There was this time last summer when Kitty and I rode our bikes all over Ithaca, ending up at Stewart Park. As we unlaced our sneakers and waded into Cayuga Lake, a motorboat whipped by, towing a small boy on an oversized yellow inner tube. The kid, both hands gripping the plastic handles, had a frantic expression on his face as his pleas to stop were swallowed by the rumble of the horsepower. The spotter was consumed with smearing on sunblock, the driver consumed with two bikini-clad women capsizing a Sunfish. Which left the boy two options: to catapult himself into murky waters, or to get dragged along, completely out of his control, until the powers-that-be decided to terminate his joyride. He chose the latter.

I kept revisiting that image over the next few weeks, as I watched my life being disassembled, one familiarity at a time. I avoided Dad assiduously until his late-May departure, as soon as Cornell let out. And I only talked to Mom when absolutely necessary. Like when the conversation swung to the looming question at hand: next year.

Mom had already taken a leave of absence from her job as an art teacher at the middle school. And in a matter of weeks, a faceless family who'd agreed to sublet from us back in February would be pulling into the driveway, stocking the cupboards, peeing in the toilets of the home I've lived in since I was two years old. This is all I know about them, from the realtor's letter that lay open on Mom's dresser:

1. The man's name is Dr. Oscar Mueller. 2. He's going to teach statistics at Cornell and his  wife will work at the vet school. 3. They're from Cincinnati. 4. They have one teenager.

Edition details

• Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385327439
• ISBN 13: 9780385327435
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240