Zac & Mia - A.J. Betts

Zac Meier is sick. He has been stuck in his hospital room for almost a month after a bone marrow transplant, and to make it just that much worse, his mother refuses to go home and leave him in peace. One day, he hears a new voice through the wall; in the next room Zac hears a very angry girl's voice and Lady Gaga repeated over and over and over again. He eventually finds out the girl's name is Mia and she is suffering from cancer in her leg. The two strike up a rather tumultuous but ultimately uplifting and complex friendship over the next nine months. As it says in the official synopsis, "in this tough and tender young adult novel [there's] a lot about love . . . and a little about cancer."

 I know what you're thinking. Doesn't this sound a lot like The Fault in Our Stars? And my answer is, perhaps, but without as much emotional manipulation, in my humble opinion. (That's not to say that I don't like Green's novel, but I knew what he wanted me to feel the whole way through.) In Betts' novel, I just knew that I was reading the stories of two very complicated teenagers going through a gruelling set of trials, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
The marrow's German—the doctors were allowed to tell me that much. I've had German marrow for fourteen days, and through I'm not yet craving pretzels or beer or lederhosen, it doesn't mean I'm not changed in other ways. Alex and Matt have nicknamed me Helga, and it's caught on. Now the whole football team thinks it's hilarious that I could be part pretzel-baking, beer-swilling, braid swinging Frรคulein from Bavaria with massive die Brust.
Zac and Mia are both fantastically rounded characters. While they are not always perfect and loveable, they are real, and display authentic emotions consistently throughout the book. While I admit to being wary of novels focusing on cancer or other terminal illnesses, I did not find myself thinking of this as a "cancer" novel, but rather as a novel about survival, hardship, and unlikely friendships. Even the secondary characters didn't ring false in my eyes. And while I don't thing there are many truly perfect novels (if any), I just really found myself connecting with these characters, even at their worst.
From this side of the wall, I hear the newbie arrive. Nina goes through the instructions in her cheerful air hostess way, as if this flight will go smoothly. It won't. There'll be turbulence. Unexpected stopovers. Bad food. Loss of oxygen and moments of sheer panic. But if the newbie's lucky, he won't endure it alone. 
The first part of the novel is told from Zac's perspective, the second part from alternating perspectives, and the third part from Mia's perspective. This style gives a wonderfully rounded quality to the overall text and gives readers access to the inner-workings of both Zac and Mia. Zac is obsessed with statistics about death while Mia is (or at least was) obsessed with her looks and her status among peers, and although this doesn't last for the entirety of the novel, they are not at all unusual ways of viewing the world from a teenage perspective. 

 Originally published in Australia in 2012, Zac & Mia is officially being published in the North American market, and I hope it will see a dedicated audience soon!

 Highly Recommended

 (Note: This review is from an Advance Reading Copy - Out September 2, 2014)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Living - Matt De La Peรฑa

Image
The Living  recently received an Honor from the Pura Belprรฉ committee. The award recognizes of a work which best portrays the Latino cultural experience in a work of literature for children or youth. As I was at the awards announcements, and having known people who served on the committee in the past, I was intrigued. I had read the winning title and the other honor titles, and was impressed with the choices. So here's my review of The Living : The novel begins with Shy, a young guy working for a snazzy cruise line, offering water to people on the Lido Deck of the ship to combat the heat. Everything is going pretty well until an older gentleman comes out and starts spouting of weird, disconcerting phrases: "You have seen the face of evil."Shy doesn't quite know what to think, so he moves on to a couple of ladies on the other side of the deck. Just as he's handing them their water bottles, he sees movement out of the corner of his eye and realizes the old guy h
Read more

The Music of What Happens - Bill Konigsberg

Image
Max: Chill. Sports. Video games. Gay and not a big deal, not to him, not to his mom, not to his buddies. And a secret: An encounter with an older kid that makes it hard to breathe, one that he doesn't want to think about, ever. Jordan: The opposite of chill. Poetry. His "wives" and the Chandler Mall. Never been kissed and searching for Mr. Right, who probably won't like him anyway. And a secret: A spiraling out of control mother, and the knowledge that he's the only one who can keep the family from falling apart. Over the course of one summer, two boys will have to face their biggest fears and decide what they're willing to risk -- to get the thing they want the most. This is a phenomenal book, in my humble opinion. There aren't too many books dealing with male sexual abuse, particularly in YA. Sex and sexuality are messy parts of young adulthood, but what this book does really well is discuss consent and the ways in which physical cues can be misinte
Read more

Girls Like Us - Gail Giles

Image
I have now gone out and made sure that I have all of the books longlisted for the National Book Award. I read and reviewed a number of these previously, so now I have five left to read and review. This is one of those five (but would I expect anything less from the fabulous team at Candlewick?) Girls Like Us  is a unique novel in a number of respects, most notably in the fact that both protagonists are identified (and self-identified) as mentally disabled in some way. Biddy has a learning disability that she was born with, while Quincy is a young girl who is disabled due to the fact that her mother's boyfriend hit her in the head with a brick, disfiguring her and damaging her brain. Once the two girls graduate from school, they move into a house together, becoming caregivers for both each other and an older woman, Elizabeth. The two must rely on each other for comfort, knowledge, and emotional strength, and Elizabeth manages to help them along the way. While I had moments of wo
Read more