Serendipity and Me by Judith Roth

Serendipity and Me is a sweet, touching novel in verse that tells the story of a young girl and her father trying to cope with an unimaginable loss. 

Sara who is in Grade 6, lives in Central California with her father who is a college professor. Her mother passed away three years earlier as a result of a car accident. The story opens with Sara rehearsing for a play that her class will put on the following Saturday. She is Wendy and a boy she is crushing on, Garrett, has the role of Peter Pan. However, four days before the performance, Sara becomes very ill. When it becomes apparent that she will not recover in time, the part is given to another classmate. This is devastating to Sara.

While her father works at the college across the street, Sara who is home sick is cared for by a neighbour, Mrs. Whittier, and also one of her father's students, a young woman named Jocelyn. Despite Sara not knowing her, she tells Jocelyn about losing her part in the play, how much she misses mother and how sad her father has become over the loss of his wife. When Jocelyn sees all the cat pictures in Sara's room, she asks why Sara doesn't have a cat. Sara tells her that her father has repeatedly refused her a cat. But Sara desperately wants a cat because a cat will give her something warm and soft to love again.

Then on the Saturday of the play, when Sara is at her lowest, knowing the play is going ahead without her, someone rings the doorbell and leaves a little white kitten on her doorstep. Her father is adamant that the kitten will not stay. Sara manages to convince her father to let her keep the kitten until the morning and then for a week, by lying to him about her best friend Taylor's mom considering taking the cat. Sara has one week to try to convince her father that what she really needs and wants is this little soft kitten.

I think --
         No is not a fair word
         when you're a kid
         without a mother
         and you need something soft
         to hold on to.

The following week Sara returns to school and tries to find ways to change her father's mind about the kitten. But Sara also tries to get her father to open up about her mother. Every time she broaches the subject her father retreats. When Sara has to bring a picture of her family into school for an assignment, she cannot find one of her with both her parents. This leads her to hunt for a box of pictures that she knows her father has saved and when she finds it, the pictures in the box  provide some clues about her mother, but also lead to more questions. Sara knows she needs to confront her father about her mother and why she can't keep the lost kitten.

Her father, seeing that Sara is beginning to want to know about her mother and their family,  gives her a book that Sara's mother gave him when they first met years ago. The book is copy of poems by Sara Teasdale which her mother, Aislinn, gave to Sara's father, when they were in college. This combined with a box of pictures that Sara finds and a CD her mother made of her telling Sara a bedtime fairytale, help Sara to learn more about her mother and to begin to deal with her grief. But her father's resolution of his grief seems impossible. And it appears more and more that his unwillingness to have a cat in the house is tied to the loss of Sara's mother. Will Sara ever get her father to confront his grief and allow her to express her own?

Discussion  

Serendipity and Me is a short novel that explores the themes of loss and grief. Sara and her father are grieving over the loss of her mother. 

Roth's poetry is simple yet expressive, conveying a young girls deep loss of her mother and her father's intense loneliness and grief. Sara's father's grief is so intense that he cannot talk about it. However a little white kitten named Serendipity brings father and daughter together to talk about a person they both loved and lost. The poems are free verse and tell the story from Sara's point of view. Sara discovers that her mother loved poetry and also wrote poems and so this leads Sara to try her hand at poetry too.

While the basic storyline is sad, Roth incorporates a hint of a blossoming crush between Sara and Garrett. She also demonstrates how acts of kindness on the part of neighbours and classmates can go a long way to comforting those who are going through a difficult time in their life. Despite the tragedy Sara and her father have experienced and the difficulties they have faced, the novel ends with a hopeful, positive tone.

This beautiful story makes an excellent choice for a Mother-Daughter book club.

Book Details:
Serendipity and Me by Judith Roth
New York: Viking Press 2013
312 pp.

Orchards by Holly Thompson

Kanako (Kana) Goldberg who is an eighth grader, is being sent to Japan to spend some time with her mother's family. She is being sent there for the summer after the suicide of Ruth, one of her classmates.  Ruth was found in the Osgood orchards, having hanged herself from one of the apple trees. She left a note on her dresser leading her parents to call police and to counselors being brought in. Kanako tells her parents, 

"why?

I protested

it wasn't my fault

I didn't do anything!"

Her mother calls her older sister, Kanako's aunt in Shizuoka and in spite of Kanako's protests tells her,

"all she'd say
row after row
in tight-lipped
talk-down
do-as-I-say
Japanese
was

you can reflect

in the presence of your ancestors"

All twenty-nine girls from Kanako's grade eight class are being sent somewhere. She was part of a clique of girls who were mean to Ruth. Kana likens her clique to the structure of an atom, in which Lisa, head of the clique, is the atom and the other girls are like electrons arranged in shells around her. Ruth, the girl who committed suicide was "in the least stable most vulnerable outermost shell".

Kanako's father is a Russian Jew while her mother is the youngest of four children born to her grandparents who are mikan orange farmers. Her mother's family lived in a Shizuoka village of only sixty families where the son inherited the family property. Since there was no son to inherit the property, Kanako's oldest sister married a man  who took on their family name and inherited the farm. Her mother packs her suitcase full of gifts for the family back in Japan as well as ten books on responsbility, and self-discovery.

Kanako is met in Narita by her cousins Koichi and Yurie. As they drive to the farm in the van, Yurie tells Kanako that she will room with her. When Kanako last visited her Baachan three years ago after the death of her grandfather, her Jiichan, Baachan made comments about her size. Kanako's aunt and uncle bow to her and welcome her to their home. For the first three days, Kanako wakes early, even before Yurie who gets up early to help with chores before going to her job at the pharmacy.

On her fourth day in Kohama, Kanako's uncle takes her to meet the homeroom teacher and principal of the middle school she will attend while in Japan. She will attend class part time for four weeks. So every weekday morning, along with two other girls from Kohama, Kanako pedals her bicycle up a steep hill to the school situated on top of a hill of mikan terraces. Kanako can read Japanese because she took classes in New York. As Kanako watches the students in this school she remembers how Ruth sat and talked with Jake Osgood whom Lisa wanted to date. 

In the afternoons, Kanako helps in the mikan groves, thinning clusters of excess mikan fruit from the trees. Kanako's aunt asks her about her school in New York her mother's business but nothing about what happened even though she's sure her aunt knows.

When Kanako sees the same situation developing in her Japanese school, a girl ostracized and ridiculed, she attempts to do what counselors told her back home, reach out, but the girl isn't interested in her help or friendship. Kanako tries to connect with her friends back home, but it seems things have changed: they are polite and restrained.

In a flashback, Kanako reveals how her parents met: her mother, after failing her college entrance exams, took a job in the district agricultural office and then flew to New York. There, living with three Japanese, she took community college class and worked at a Japanese restaurant where she learned how to wear a kimono. It was at the restaurant that she met Kanako's father who was a law student at the time. Soon they were meeting on Sunday for brunch. However, Kanako's Jiichan and Baachan lured her mother home with the promise of money to purchase land for hothouses so she could start her own business. Kanako's mother came home to Kohama because she felt that Kanako's father "didn't fit her future". She returned to working in the agricultural office while planning to set up a business to grow "salad greens and heirloom vegetables". However, Kanako's father didn't give up and after graduating he flew to Narita, located the home of Sachiko Mano and proposed to her mother in the driveway. They married three weeks later and eventually moved to a suburb of New York City. Eventually her parents bought a small house with enough land for some greenhouses for her mother to grow Japanese vegetables. 

As the business thrived, Kanako and then her sister Emi were born. Their family visited Japan but it wasn't long before Kanako began to realize that the relationship between the two families was strained. They never stayed with Jiichan and Baachan but at other relatives homes. It was when Jiichan got cancer that he changed towards Kanako and her family, teaching her many interesting things. Considering this, Kanako begins to consider what Lisa's life may have been like.

Once school is done, Kanako works full days on the mikan farm. And in the silence of the hard work, Kanako has time to think about Ruth, what happened that fateful day in Osgoods orchard and how she can be better going forward. Her time with her mother's Japanese family leads to acceptance, forgiveness and healing.

Discussion

Orchards by Holly Thompson is a free verse  novel that explores the issue of bullying and teen suicide. In the novel, Kanako is part of a clique of grade eight girls who bully their classmate, Ruth. The girl at the center of this clique, Lisa likes a boy named Jake Osgood. When they see Jake and Ruth spending time together they bully Ruth, whom they assume is attempting to interfere. What they do not know is that Jake whose sister is bipolar, is attempting to help Ruth who has started to suffer from intense mood swings of depression and manic happiness. Because of their bullying, Ruth hangs herself in the Osgoods' orchard, leaving a suicide note that implicates the clique of girls. 

Kanako's family sends her to stay with family in Japan in the hopes that while she is away she can think about what happened. As Kanako spends the next three months with her mother's family in Japan, she experiences an inner journey of self-revelation and discovery. 

Initially Kanako views Ruth with anger and a complete lack of empathy for what happened to her. Bullied and not included, Ruth is described by Kanako as inconsequential, like a "least stable" electron in the outer shell of a clique whose atom was a girl named Lisa, known for her "biting wit". 

Initially Kanako can't comprehend why she and her friends are to blame for Ruth's suicide.

"still

I don't think I

personally

did anything to drive you

to perfect slipknots

or learn to tie a noose..."

Instead, she callously blames Ruth for her banishment to Japan.

"because of you, Ruth,

I'm exiled

to my maternal grandmother, Baachan,

to the ancestors at the altar

and to Uncle, Aunt and cousins..."

Kanako wonders if things would be different if she had grown up Jewish attending synagogue and Hebrew school and going to Ruth's Bat Mitzvah. She also believes that Ruth should have told them what she and Jake Osgoods talked about. 

As she works in the mikan orchard thinning fruit, Kanako thinks about Ruth and wonders if she should have approached her at the mall, eaten lunch with her in the cafeteria, or invited her to be a part of her group in science, even though she seemed to want to be alone. But she also curses Ruth in an moment that shows her lack of gratitude towards her Japanese family, after Baachan is not pleased with her mother sending over more sun hats.  

In remembering how her parents met and the way her Japanese grandparents felt about their daughter marrying an American, Kanako begins to realize that there are "two sides to every story" and that this might apply to Ruth and what happened to her. Kanako's grandfather, Jiichan was mean to her mother and father and their family because he was hurting from the loss of his daughter who had moved to America after her marriage. Kanako wonders if Lisa living with her godparents instead of her parents was what made her so mean to Ruth.

fault and blame --
both seem so easy to place
but much harder
maybe
to erase

I think
there must be at least
two sides
to your story, too, Ruth,

and maybe knowing
more of Lisa's side

In an attempt to banish thoughts of Ruth, Kanako tries to find comfort in being very busy and adapting to life in Japan. A trip to Tokyo on Marine Day, with older second cousin Asuka, provides some relief to Kana, but when she returns, the long days of work in the mikan orchard provide opportunities for more soul searching.

In remembering the days after Ruth's death, Kanako considers how when people began blaming the grade eight girls, their sadness turned to anger and how they blamed Ruth,
"they were just words, Ruth,

what Lisa said

you didn't have to listen

to words

four words

hurled

in jealousy"

Kanako remembers how a group session with a counselor led them to learn that there was another side to Ruth's story, that she was experiencing depression and believed that she might be bipolar and that Jake was trying to help Ruth because his own sister was dealing with the same issues. 

It is Kanako's grandmother, Baachan who really helps her process what has happened and helps her when new tragedy strikes. Kanako comes to realize that her mother's family knows far more about what happened than she realizes. At the prompting of Baachan, Kanako reaches out to Jake via a letter and he responds back about how he's trying not to hate himself and others for what they didn't do. 

"I try not to hate Lisa

for what she did

but it's hard

I try not to hate myself, too

I try not to hate all of us

for what we didn't do"

Kanako considers what she could have done would include talking, listening and including Ruth. And she hopes that there is a way to show people that she and her friends are different now. Even though Jake does reach out to Lisa, she also commits suicide, devastating Kanako.  It is Baachan, normally reticent and sharp with Kanako who helps. She stays with Kanako, feeding her and sleeping beside her. Jake's message to Lisa is revealed as one that offers encouragement and a way forward for all of them.

"we can't hate ourselves

just find a way to make this

turn you into someone

better than you were

that's what we all have to do

that's all we can do"

Because she has watched everything unfold from a distance, Baachan's offers a clear perspective of what has happened.Kanako asks Baachan if she thinks it was a mistake to have Jake contact Lisa but Baachan responds that it was a mistake to send Lisa away to summer school in another state alone, without any support. Baachan points out to Kanako that she has been sent to stay with family who love her and could offer her support. Lisa did not have this and could not cope with the guilt she felt. Eventually it is Kanako's Japanese family's traditions that offer her a way forward, of honoring both Ruth and Lisa and providing healing for her friends and herself.

Orchards is a well crafted novel that explores the issue of teen suicide and bullying. One of the strongest messages Thompson offers her young readers is to never assume something about someone else. Outward actions and appearances may not be a true reflection of what is going on in their life.  We can't know the battles that a person is fighting daily. This is why kindness and thoughtful empathy are so important.

Book Details:
Orchards by Holly Thompson Illustrations by Grady McFerrin
New York: Delacorte Press 2011
325 pp.