LitPick Review
Fern’s family spends most of their time at their family restaurant, Harry’s, where her parents use their family for commercials. Her older sister Sara takes a year off of school to work at the restaurant. Fern’s in charge of watching her three-year-old brother, Charlie. Holden, her gay older brother is battling bullies while Fern helps him come out to their family. Even with all of this, Fern feels invisible. Her parents never pay attention to her, and Holden and Sara have their own problems to deal with. Charlie and her best friend Ran are all Fern has, but Charlie doesn’t understand what she’s going through and he’s become the center of attention. And then tragedy strikes. How will she can her family cope?
Opinion:
I liked this book a lot; it shows what it’s like to have a family that is always too busy for you. Knowles combined a lot of themes in this book: family, sexuality, tragedy, and bullying. She didn’t put all of these things into one person; she put them in a dysfunctional family. I think that Knowles could’ve improved this book by adding a point of view from each member of Fern's family. Have a chapter for Sara, then one for Holden, one for her mom, one for her dad, and one for Charlie. It would’ve allowed more people to relate to the characters. We’d get to know more about the rest of her family, and we’d be able to relate to the rest of them.
