--Breathless by Jessica Warman
“Right there, in his laugh, I can sense his emotional axis shifting a little, off-kilter. It’s something I’ve come to call privately the kaleidoscope of crazy—shimmering and beautiful in certain lights, paisley and horrifying in others. Will is almost twenty-one and in certain lights looks more like twelve, in others closer to thirty. I know him as well as myself and not at all. All I can figure to do is hold on. He is my only brother.”
--Breathless by Jessica Warman
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“Before this summer started, I hadn’t seen my brother in five months, which is how long it’s been since his last stint in a psych unit. There have been so many episodes of his absence—three weeks here, six months there. All my childhood memories since we moved to Hillsburg fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, with pieces missing in the most conspicuous places: my birthday without my brother, age nine. Spring without him, age eleven. A whole childhood, not so whole. For the longest time, the gaps in our relationship didn’t seem to matter. I missed him so much that it only made me love him more once he came home again. After all, we’d been friends since the day I was born.”
--Breathless by Jessica Warman “The less my dad was around, the more we seemed to have. My parents put in a swimming pool for me. We got a new minivan, new furniture, and a high stockade fence around our backyard to cut us off from our neighbors. Already, I know they had started to hate us. They were jealous. They watched us come and go, and the more we got, the less they smiled. It was right about that time when things started to go wrong with Will.”
--Breathless by Jessica Warman “Reardan was the opposite of the rez. It was the opposite of my family. It was the opposite of me. I didn’t deserve to be there. I knew it; all of those kids knew it. Indians don’t deserve shit.”
--The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie “He glanced at me but quickly turned away. He didn’t want me to see his reaction, but I did, and I’ll never forget it. In that brief glimpse, I could see what he was thinking behind that fixed stare. There would be no grandkids, there would be no more Creed family bloodlines, nothing else to look forward to. For that point on I’d become the last, most devastating disappointment in what he thought his life had added up to---one overwhelming failure. I looked over to him, a little boy just wanting his dad to look back on him with approval. I wanted him to make some joke about what a loser that other kids was, about how I’d really kicked ass tonight, about how he’d never seen a high score like that. I wanted him to muss my hair and take me home and pop some popcorn so we could stay up late and watch Saturday Night Live. I wanted him to tell me everything would be okay."
--Hero by Perry Moore “I never thought I’d have a story worth telling, at least not one about me. I always knew I was different, but until I discovered I had my own story, I never thought I was anything special. My destiny began to unfurl during my very last game at school. What started with an accident on the court ended with the single most devastating look I ever got from my father. And it made me want to die.”
--Hero by Perry Moore “But you want to know why, don’t you? Why did I lie about having a brother? I wanted to see if I could do it: invent a person. Make them believable. Real. Whole. I wanted to see if you would buy it. And you did. You buy everything, don’t you? You make it too easy.”
--Liar by Justine Larbalestier “My father is a liar and so am I. But I’m going to stop. I have to stop. I will tell you my story and I will tell it straight. No lies, no omissions. That’s my promise. This time I truly mean it.”
--Liar by Justine Larbalestier “And it’s while I’m contemplating this that I think about what the nurse said. She’s running the show. And suddenly I understand what Gramps was really asking Gran. He had listened to that nurse, too. He got it before I did. If I stay. If I live. It’s up to me.”
--If I Stay by Gayle Foreman “Back at home all was the same! Dad never there except occasionally for one of mother’s dry, burned little meals, mother coiled tight inside her shell of angry, resentful silence; my brother in his, and I in mine. Of course, my silence was no longer a matter of choice.”
--Stitches by David Small |