Forever Or A Long Long Time

Reviewed by: Carla McAllister - New Gloucester Public Library, New Gloucester, Maine, Southern Maine Library District

Review Date: October 24, 2017

Review

Flora is 10 and her brother Julian, 9. They have been adopted and have been with their forever family for 2 years. They were in the foster system for several years and experienced some good times and many scary, nearly neglectful and injurious times. They have memories, or more accurately, feelings of things that happened before they came to be adopted. Convinced that they were never born as they have no baby pictures and no memories of being born and feeling that a real mother would never have disappeared, they entertain several theories of how they came into existence; they came from the sea, from blood, from chaos. They are waiting constantly to be sent to another home and, therefore, are always frightened. Julian hides food as he is afraid he will never have enough; Flora loses her words and simply cannot communicate. When Mom and Dad announce that they are to have a new baby, one that will be born in a natural way, the children decide that there will never be enough love to go around and that they will become superfluous and will lose the love they have guardedly learned to expect. When their Mom takes them on a quest to find out all that happened to the children in their younger years and how they came to be in the system, the definition of family is questioned. There are some extremely sad revelations about what transpired in some of the kids' placements that made this reader angry and tearful. I very much recommend this book for anyone aged 8 and above, even or maybe especially adults. I nominate this for Cream.

Overall Book Score: excellent