Sparrow 12+

About this book

Sparrow has always had a difficult time making friends. She would always rather have stayed home on the weekends with her mother, an affluent IT Executive at a Brooklyn bank, reading, or watching the birds, then playing with other kids. And that's made school a lonely experience for her. It's made LIFE a lonely experience.

But when the one teacher who really understood her — Mrs. Wexler, the school librarian, a woman who let her eat her lunch in the library office rather than hide in a bathroom stall, a woman who shared her passion for novels and knew just the ones she'd love — is killed in a freak car accident, Sparrow's world unravels and she's found on the roof of her school in an apparent suicide attempt.

With the help of an insightful therapist, Sparrow finally reveals the truth of her inner life. And it's here that she discovers an outlet in Rock & Roll music...

Reviews

From Sparrow:

I walk home from school, looking everywhere for a bird –- any kind –- but it's like they've all left town. I feel a kind of lonely that's entirely different from the eat-lunch-in-the-bathroom kind. It's worse. Somewhere inside is the knowledge that they're never coming back. That I traded them in for just the idea of talking. That they know that I will eventually betray them, and so they've forgotten me. I try not to listen to this knowledge...

I curl into a ball on my bed. I can't bear to look out the window. I don't want to see the empty sky. Don't want to wait for them to come, knowing that they never will. I stay curled in a ball until the sun sets. I fall asleep, I guess, but fall isn't really the word. I plummet.

In my dream, for a minute, things are perfect. My body goes light and my arms go out, my heart swoops up and soars down; it's like it always is... I stretch my wings...