Ten Things We Did by
Sarah Mlynowski My rating:
2 of 5 stars I'd have to rank this book as merely OK. It was not especially bad, but I also didn't love it.
April is the protagonist. She's a sixteen-year-old with some rather extreme problems, problems that don't become clear very quickly in the novel. As the book opens, April is living with her father and stepmother in New York and learns that the family is moving to Cleveland for her father's new job. Her mother is remarried and lives in France with April's younger brother. April refuses to leave her hometown--and manages to convince her father that she'll be living with her friend Vi, under Vi's mother's supervision. But Vi's mother, Suzanne, is in a traveling production of
Mary Poppins, and the two girls will be living alone. To make the situation more implausible, April's mother remembers how flighty Suzanne is, and when she realizes the girls are living alone, she doesn't intervene. Each chapter of the novel is set up around something that April and Vi do that they really should not have done. Some of the problems are slightly silly and don't have serious ramifications, such as their decision to buy Hula the hot tub. Others, such as their decision to adopt a cat, have far reaching implications.
The best part of the book was the psychological realism of April. The plot itself is rather unrealistic--I simply cannot imagine a parent buckling to a teenager's refusal to move to another state. Once you get past that point, the novel becomes more and more interesting. Each of April's decisions illustrates how broken she is. Even before her father announces his new job, April feels isolated from him and her mother. Her refusal to move to Cleveland has less to do with being unwilling to explore a new city and more to do with her unhealthy reliance on her friends and boyfriend as her sole sources of emotional support. April is quite lost, and the burdens she places on her friends are rather unfair in that they are simply not mature enough to bear them as yet. But this is a lesson that April must learn. She's already learned that her parents are not perfect, and she must learn to deal with that as well.
Overall, I thought the novel was well-crafted and well-written, but it simply didn't wow me as much as I had hoped it would. I have the feeling that I would have loved it as a teenager. The sexual content is heavy but not explicit. Some would recommend this book only for older teens; I'd disagree. I'd say this is appropriate for readers 14+, as it does explore the ramifications of teen sexuality in a nuanced and realistic manner rather than simply making it titillating.
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