My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece

by: Annabel Pitcher

Recommended Age: YA

Lexile: N/A

Sensitive Content: Racism, death, alcoholic/neglectful parent

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This book follows ten-year-old Jamie, five years after his sister Rose and 61 other innocent people were killed by bombs. His mom left her two children, Rose's twin Jasmine and Jamie in the hands of their neglectful, racist and drunk father. Jas remains deeply affected and troubled by the death of her twin sister, yet Jamie doesn't get bothered by it, seeing how young he was to really get-to-know Rose, and hasn't cried since. At his new school, he makes friends with a girl named Sunya, who's a Muslim. Unfortunately, his father doesn't like Muslims as he blames them for his daughter's death (the father is racist), and thus Jamie must keep their friendship a secret. This book is narrated by Jamie.

What I Thought:

To be honest, I didn't really enjoy the book. Rather, I got annoyed with it, mostly by the style of the writing. Firstly, the dialogue was written in italics, so at times it got pretty confusing as to how to differentiate the internal thinking and dialogue. Next, each speaker didn't have their own paragraph for dialogue. As the dialogue was italicized, it would get really irritating having to guess who said what, if there was no speaker tags. And half the time, there weren't any. Also, I thought the father was a bit too racist (I understand the author was trying to show this for a reason, but it got a little much at times) Anyways, this is just my opinion however I have heard this is a multiple award-winning book.