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 | The Girl Who Wanted to Fly
L. Rivlin
14-year-old Mo Tamworth keeps up a tough front while hiding her despair about her disability. She is especially miserable about how she looks during the three swimming lessons a week that she must take for remedial exercise. When horseriding is suggested as an alternative, she is overjoyed. However, when Mo starts learning to ride, she is forced to confront her attitudes to imperfection -- both in herself and in others. In the process, she comes to the realisation that the world is not divided into "whole" and "deficient" but that all people have their own level of handicap and even bullies have their individual hells to live in. This story charts the development of a teenage girl from her fury about not living up to an ideal of beauty and her disgust with any deviation from that ideal, to the realisation that her feelings of personal worth should depend only on her certainty that she is trying as hard as she can, to be the best that she can be.
Review:
From an Amazon customer:
When I opened this book, I didn't know what to expect. Heartwarming tales of personal triumph over the demons of adolescence aren't exactly my thing. But this isn't some treacly feel-good book, it's about a girl's journey through learned bitterness and hate into maturity. Even though the story is told in first-person, you start off rather disliking Mo, the main character. She is a schoolyard bully and proud of it.
In time, it becomes apparent that Mo is actually quite bright, and it's not just her legs causing turbulence in her life. Rivlin paints a realistic people and places. If the dialog is a bit stilted, especially in the opening pages, she can be forgiven for what it shows about her characters. While Mo's rehabilitation (both physically and mentally) involves horses, they are not so present as to ruin the tale for the non-horse-lover. As a horse person, though, I found myself chuckling in delight at Rivlin's descriptions of barns and riding from a newcomer's perspective. As an American, I was surprised about the appearance of Western saddles in an English tale, and as a side-saddle rider, tickled by those passages as well.
I found the character Trish to be compelling as well. People's reactions to this girl with Down's Syndrome were disturbingly close to my own learning process about the condition. Mo's changing attitudes toward Trish were for me the most engrossing parts of the book. And somehow Rivlin pulled it off without once sounding preachy.
All in all, a very good read - teaching self-acceptance and tolerance without lecturing.
4 November 2009
978-1904987-62-8
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