“There was so much that was good about this book. I appreciated that Melody, a girl with cerebral palsy who can't speak, had her own imperfections (beyond her disability) and wasn't written as a complete saint--that's a pitfall many authors can't seem to avoid when trying to write a book like this from the perspective of a disabled child. Melody is smart as a whip but needs help to communicate and has almost no control over her body, and yet many of the people responsible for her education weren't willing to accept her abilities for what they really are. I liked that there were so many varieties of reactions to her--that many of her classmates may have been outright rude and cruel to her, but many of them were in gray areas . . . meaning they said and did a lot of the right things but did so out of apparent feelings of obligation, not because they wanted to.
I liked how realistic the mainstreaming experience was for Melody, and I liked that her time in the disabled class was clearly just babysitting (because that totally happens in school all the time). And I liked that sometimes when bad things happened, the story didn't swoop in and pull out a miracle solution to make everything okay again. The author let disaster strike and then let the characters further show their colors by dealing with it.
There were a few things I didn't like, but most of it was just delivery. There were a couple places where I thought Melody made some insensitive comments about fat people (commenting mentally that someone's belly was "gross" or suggesting people's large size as automatically unflattering). The narration flipped from past tense to present tense pretty much arbitrarily, though it did it in chunks or between chapters so it wasn't particularly distracting. I thought the children sometimes spoke too maturely--for instance, a fifth grader is quoted as saying "It never occurred to me that Melody had thoughts in her head." I taught elementary school and even though obviously some of the children had advanced vocabulary, they didn't tend to talk like this; sometimes it just didn't sound natural. There was one bit that felt planted: when Melody's sister is pointed out to have a tendency to run out the door to try to get in the car, I knew it would be important and I knew however it would be important would be dangerous, so I just kept waiting for it to happen. But except for these small things, I found it an enjoyable read and I thought Melody was a fascinating character, and the storytelling style was innovative.
I cried a little when one of the first things Melody did when she got her talking machine was tell her parents she loved them.”
swankivy wrote this review Tuesday, January 17, 2012.
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