Teenreads.com -- WOULD YOU by Marthe Jocelyn

WOULD YOU
Marthe Jocelyn
Wendy Lamb Books/Random House
Fiction
ISBN: 9780375837036
176 pages

It's the summer before junior year, and as Natalie endures the start of the year's first heat wave, she says, "Summer just started and it's already boring." She thinks ahead to a long, lazy summer, lifeguarding at the YMCA, sneaking into absent neighbors' backyards to use their pools late at night, and just spending time with her friends at the Ding-Dong diner. Natalie has smart friends who tease each other gently, engage in harmless flirtations and challenge each other with hypothetical, and sometimes gross, moral dilemmas (for example: "Would you rather eat a rat with the fur still on or eat sewage straight from the pipe?").

Natalie's summer will be fine, she guesses, but she knows that at the end of it, her beautiful, brilliant older sister Claire will be off to college. Claire is embracing her future, telling Natalie at the opening of the book, "I have this roar in my head…of anticipation. That it's all just starting. Stuff I don't even know about." As for Natalie, when she imagines Claire leaving for school, she feels sick to her stomach.

Claire's future is bright, and her summer is sure to be glorious --- until one second changes things for Claire and her entire family forever. Returning home from a late-night swimming party, Natalie sees police cruisers and ambulances in a nearby neighborhood. She doesn't connect these sirens and flashing lights with herself until she returns home to find her mother and father nearly hysterical with fear and worry. Claire, they say, has been hit by a car, has a severe head injury and is in a coma.

Over the next several days, Natalie and her family face moral and ethical dilemmas far more strenuous than anything her friends had cooked up before. She feels guilt over "borrowing" Claire's new black blouse and assuming that Claire's shiny new Apple laptop will be hers soon. She clashes with her mother over the state of her (and Claire's) room and with her father over the possibility of Claire's emergence from the coma and the ability to seek revenge. She feels uncomfortable when she is asked to massage Claire's nearly unrecognizable feet, and finds unexpected moments of grace and clarity when she speaks to her unresponsive sister in the lonely hospital room. After a brain scan reveals the worst possible outcome, Natalie and her parents must answer the most difficult questions of all.

There certainly have been plenty of other young adult novels about death and dying, but many of them are unbearably angst-ridden or nauseatingly maudlin and sentimental. WOULD YOU is neither of the above. It is, instead, a realistic, thoughtful exploration of the kinds of tough choices --- and the painful thoughts --- that run through people's heads during moments of tragedy. Although Natalie inevitably compares herself negatively to her golden older sister, readers will recognize her as a bright, articulate, contemplative girl forced to move into a new kind of future before she feels entirely ready.

As Natalie says near the book's close, the ending is "nowhere near happy," but she does, with the help of her remarkably perceptive and supportive friends and family, find a measure of hope, a way of looking peacefully at a future that no longer has Claire in it.

--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

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