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Library | Call Number | Status |
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Searching... Monmouth Public Library | YA Fic Trueman, T. 2000 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Library | YA FIC TRU | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Shawn McDaniel is an enigma and a miracle--except no one knows it, least of all his father. His life is not what it may seem to anyone looking at him. Not even those who love him best have any idea what he is truly like. In this extraordinary and powerful first novel, the reader learns to look beyond the obvious and finds a character whose spirit is rich beyond imagining and whose story is unforgettable.My life is like one of those "good news-bad news" jokes. Like, "I've got some good news and some bad news--which do you want first?" Books for the Teen Age 2001 (NYPL), Books for Youth Editor's Choice 2000 (Booklist), Top 10 Youth First Novels 2000(Booklist), 2001 Best Books for Young Adults (ALA), 2001 Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Readers (ALA), and 2001 Michael L. Printz Honor Book
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9-Up While this reading of the book by Terry Trueman (HarperCollins, 2000) follows the Printz Honor book to the letter, hearing it transforms the experience completely. Narrator Johnny Heller's voice is suited perfectly for the protagonist, 14-year-old Shawn McDaniel, who is totally incapacitated due to cerebral palsy. Listeners come to know him - his humor, ennui, and selflessness - only though the soliloquies that he has with himself inside his own mind. While he can't communicate and his family considers him a "vegetable," he is actually very intelligent and completely aware of his surroundings. Shawn believes that his father is going to kill him to end his suffering. This painful dive into a profoundly existential dilemma is only bearable through the sound of the narrator's voice. Heller's vocal quality infuses a vitality, resiliency, and stark honesty that are so much a part of adolescence. While pathos and, oftentimes, depression permeate this story, the dry and self-deprecating humor of Shawn that Heller captures so well helps to mitigate the suffering. While Heller's voice epitomizes Shawn, it does not distinguish itself among the other characters. This is especially apparent when Shawn's father, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, reads his poem throughout the narrative; listeners who have not read the book may be confused. Using two narrators to mark this important distinction would have added to the powerfully dynamic father-son relationship. Listening to the tape is such an intense experience and the topic of euthanasia is so complex that the audiobook would be most suitable for a high school audience. While this can be a pedagogical tool for high school classes on issues of euthanasia, teachers should listen to the tape before assigning it. -Tina Hudak, St. Bernard's School, Riverdale, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
First-time novelist Trueman raises ethical issues about euthanasia through the relationship between 14-year-old Shawn McDaniel, who suffers from cerebral palsy, and his father. In a conversational tone, narrator Shawn explains that when he was born, a tiny blood vessel burst in his brain, leaving him unable to control any of his muscles. What no one knows is that Shawn is a "secret genius" who, while unable to communicate, remembers everything he has ever heard. His condition, which includes violent seizures, overwhelmed his father, who moved out when Shawn was three years old; the man later won a Pulitzer Prize for a poem based on his experiences as parent to a victim of C.P. Weaving together memories with present-day accounts, Shawn describes the highs and lows of his day-to-day life as well as his father's increasing fascination with euthanasia and evidence that the man is working up the courage to personally "end [Shawn's] pain." The strength of the novel lies in the father-son dynamic; the delicate scenes between them carefully illustrate their mutual quest to understand each other. The other characters (Shawn's brother and sister, mother, teachers) lack this complexity. As a result, many of the scenes feel more contrived than heartfelt ("I always feel so guilty complaining about it at all!" says his sister). All in all, the book's concepts are more compelling than the story line itself. Ages 10-up. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(Young Adult) At the outset of his story, fourteen-year-old Shawn McDaniel tells us his life is ""like one of those 'good news-bad news' jokes."" The good news? He loves living in Seattle, even the rain; his siblings are ""pretty cool for a brother and sister""; and best of all, Shawn has the gift of ""total recall,"" the ability to remember everything he's ever heard since the age of five. The bad news-and it's pretty bad-is that no one else knows all this about Shawn and probably never will. Born with cerebral palsy and without control of a single muscle in his body, Shawn is unable to communicate and is therefore presumed to have the mental age of a three-month-old. This fascinatingly horrifying premise makes it all the more interesting to get to know Shawn, who's a pretty interesting guy already. Bright, funny, occasionally sarcastic, and astonishingly optimistic (""negativity and self-pity are useless,"" he tells us), Shawn takes pleasure in every possible experience, from trips around Seattle to the affection of his family to the TV programs he manages to watch when his eye muscles happen to cooperate. Every image and word is stored in memory to be replayed at times when he is alone and without other stimulus. Naturally, Shawn longs to make contact with others, and the remote possibility that someday someone might know ""the real Shawn"" only increases his will to live. The chance of such a miraculous breakthrough is not, however, the tension that drives this story. That force is provided by Shawn's self-absorbed father, who has won fame with a poem about Shawn and the hardships ""a child like Shawn"" brings to a family-and who, Shawn suspects, is planning to kill him in order to ""end his pain."" Shawn's suspicions about the murderous plan and his own passion for life surely elicit sympathy, but his total inability to communicate his wishes would seem to undermine the determined ambiguity of the ending, which leavesthe helpless Shawn facing his father in an otherwise empty house. So while the plot isn't as effective as it could have been, the invention of Shawn himself is much more compelling, evoking one of our darkest fears and deepest hopes-that a fully conscious and intelligent being may be hidden within such a broken body, as yet unable to declare his existence. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A teenager with profound cerebral palsy, who is utterly unable to give even those who know him best the faintest sign that he is sentient, narrates this devastating family portrait-cum-moral conundrum. Inside Shawn's twitching, drooling, seizure-racked body is a sane, intelligent teenager with an eidetic memory. A sympathetic observer of the effect his presence has on everyone around him, he leads a relatively rich, if vicarious, inner life. It is fueled by dreams (or perhaps more than dreams) of flight, total recall of everything he has ever seen or heard, and feelings as intense as anyone's: love, amusement, bemusement, frustration--and anxiety. He overhears comments about "ending his pain," from his doting, tormented father Sydney--who has begun research for a biography of a man convicted of smothering a profoundly disabled child. Trueman has a son with CP, and has obviously drawn in part from that experience, both for the story's events and for the issues he raises involving the social and emotional costs of caring for the physically helpless. Thematically, the story is built around Sydney's dilemma as he desperately searches for reasons not to end his son's life, and finds many seductive, compelling arguments otherwise; the abrupt, ambiguous ending leaves him on the verge of killing Shawn, or not, and so transmits his inner debate to readers. Though character is not the author's strongest concern here, like the similarly lucid brain-damaged teen in Joan Leslie Woodruff's The Shiloh Renewal (1999), Shawn will stay with readers, not for what he does, but for what he is and has made of himself. (Fiction. 12 ) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Gr. 6^-10. Shawn McDaniel thinks his father is considering killing him. Of course, no one knows that Shawn is able to think at all because the 14-year-old, who has cerebral palsy, can't speak, interact, or control his movements and bodily functions. But Shawn is also a genius; he remembers everything that he hears and is even able to read. And one more thing--the seizures, which his family members find so pitiable, release his soul in a way that allows him to move about the universe and feel and see things that would be impossible to experience in his trapped body. Shawn would like to live, but he understands that his father, a Pulitzer Prize^-winning writer, who won the award for a poem about Shawn, wants him dead for the most unselfish reasons. Mr. McDaniel has watched and loved Shawn since he was a baby; he left the family when he couldn't bear to watch him anymore. Still he's a part of Shawn's life, and he fears his boy suffers with no reason and no hope. Does the responsibility of a parent to care for a child include ending suffering? This short novel packs a punch that transcends its length. Readers spend the whole book inside Shawn's head, a place that is so vivid, so unique they will be hard pressed to forget its mix of heaven and hell. Nor will they easily stop thinking about all the big issues Shawn raises--not just about life and death, but also about the meaning of freedom, and about the responsibility that comes with love. One wonders how Trueman could write something so close to the bone--until the author's note reveals that he is the father of a son like Shawn. An intense reading experience. --Ilene Cooper