Synopsis
Popularity, good looks, and a life of privilege are not enough to counter Adam's severe dyslexia and, now a teenager, he is desperate to learn to read and to find his missing life.
Reviews
Grade 5-9-Adam Brody is a talented and priviledged New Yorker who experiences severe learning and emotional problems caused by dyslexia. The novel follows a course of events that many families will find heartbreakingly realistic and familiar: endless rounds of psychological, neurological, and intelligence testing; unsympathetic teachers ill-prepared to assist a child with learning differences; and unbearable tension, including intense sibling rivalry. Contaminated by feelings of uselessness and stupidity, Adam's life continues to spiral downward. By the time he is in his early teens, he spends his afternoons smoking marijuana with his friends. Several incidents finally cause him to take responsibility for his actions: one of his so-called friends burglarizes the Brody's apartment, and he has an extremely frightening experience using LSD. Finally, he enrolls in a boarding school and gets his life back on a healthy course. Told through the randomly alternating voices of Adam and his older sister, the book has some faults. After such a long history of failure in school, Adam's various achievements in reading, writing, drama, and tennis seem to come too quickly and easily. Sometimes the dialogue is stilted and so melodramatically phrased that the characters fail to become full-fledged, sympathetic human beings. That no teacher until he enrolled in boarding school suggested Adam use a word processor is unbelievable. None of this will deter readers, who will find themselves engrossed in this fast-paced, emotional story. It is unfortunate that once again this is a novel that is likely to be too difficult for children with learning differences to read themselves. Perhaps parents, teachers, and librarians will take the time to read it aloud.
Ellen Fader, Oregon State Library, Salem
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Dyslexia itself is virtually the main character of Barrie's second novel, a work more ambitious but less satisfying than her Lone Star . Evidently drawing on personal experience, the author fashions a family headed by a producer dad and an actress mother (she stars in a TV show called Ben O'Neil, Twentieth Precinct ). The two children, Caroline and Adam, who take turns narrating the story, both have dyslexia. But while Caroline's is manageable, Adam's is almost disabling. Popular, obviously intelligent, Adam becomes increasingly frustrated as he submits to the copious ministrations of any number of tutors and teachers--and of one truly rotten doctor. Caroline, meanwhile, doesn't receive a fair share of their parents' attention; even as they blind themselves to their son's growing drug habit, they are consumed with anxiety and sympathy for his troubles in school. To her considerable credit, Barrie allows the reader to conceive of the enormous burden of a severe learning disability, and her book will win dyslexic students the respect and compassion of their classmates. But none of her characters seem as real as their various afflictions and, ironically, the division of narrative voices unflatteringly highlights Caroline's weakly delineated role in the story. Ages 10-up.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The author of Lone Star (1990), who's also an award-winning actress, describes a dyslexic's troubles and their eventual resolution in a narrative that alert readers will suspect is largely autobiographical. Though Adam is bright and has numerous gifts, his learning problems lead to academic failures and the pain of being thought lazy by insensitive teachers. His parents are supportive but, both involved in theater, otherwise engaged; older sister Caroline, who inherited a milder dyslexia from their mother, justly feels that Adam gets more than his share of attention. Schools are changed and tutors and counselors engaged with varying success; with junior high comes independence and dubious friends purveying escape through drugs, one of whom steals some things from the family's Manhattan apartment. This, plus a bad trip when Adam adds acid to his established pot habit (the joints are rolled on Zigzag brand paper), jolts him into therapy and also into accepting what seems to be the right school at last. All this is typical of boys like Adam, and too smoothly told to fall into the trap of sounding like a case study; but the sequence of events never quite evolves into a plot, while--though Adam's and Caroline's first-person voices alternate--the underlying insights seem more parental. Still, an honest and empathetic portrayal of a not uncommon set of pressures and responses. (Fiction. 10-14) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Gr. 6-9. Barrie, who made an impressive debut with Lone Star (1990), has less success this time out with the story of a dyslexic child, a tale obviously drawn from her own life. The stories are told in alternating chapters by Adam, who calls himself Adam Zigzag because that's the way he sees the written word falling on the page, and his older sister, Caroline, who's mildly dyslexic, too, but angry that her brother gets all the attention. Adam chronicles his descent downward as, despite the help of his parents, tutors, and teachers, he is unable to make sense out of his studies. Although Barrie does a good job of capturing the despair that both child and parent feel when a learning disorder takes over family life, the characters never really come alive. It is only the learning disorder itself that seems real. Still, the book's hopeful ending may inspire some kids in the same predicament; in any case, it will surely let them know they are not alone. Ilene Cooper
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