CLP Teens Blog

How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr

High school hasn’t been the dream existence that either Jill or Mandy imagined it would be. Ever since her father died, 18 year old Jill has pushed away most of her friends, pierced her eyebrow and dyed her light hair dark, expressing the blackness of her grief in ways she cannot speak. Her relationship with boyfriend Dylan is definitely strained, and she and her mother are just barely co-existing until Jill graduates and moves out. The plan is that she will take a year off before college to tour the world, just as her father did. But surviving to the end of high school is a challenge even when you have friends and a complete family.

Jill is beyond unhappy when her mother announces that she is acting on a plan she and her husband had always intended to do. She tells Jill that she is adopting a baby, and that Mandy, the pregnant teen mother, will arrive soon for the open adoption process. She will even be living with them until the baby’s birth. Jill feels that her mother is trying to replace her dad with a new family member, and it just seems wrong.

Teen mom-to-be Mandy hopes to provide her baby with the ideal home and family she never had. But even though she has dropped out of school and run away from an unhappy existence with her mother and her mother’s succession of boyfriends in Nebraska, she’s not sure she can go through with the agreement. She’s also worried that if Jill and her mother discover some things she hasn’t revealed, their hospitality with be withdrawn before she can decide what she truly wants to do.

Sara Zarr tells this remarkably true-to-life story from each girl’s perspective, revealing their hopes, dreams and fears as they face some of life’s biggest challenges. While the story is full of drama, it never sinks to soap-opera level. Readers will empathize with each of the girls as they grapple with their relationship in the midst of enormous stress and ultimately succeed in achieving a bond. This well-written work of realistic fiction is a great choice for older teens searching for believable characters in an absorbing contemporary story.

Review by Jeanne – CLP Knoxville