About book Phoenix Rising: Or How To Survive Your Life (1991)
This book has everything I wanted as a preteen. It is deliciously overwritten. The teenagers are ultra-poised and ultra-burned; they come off like divorcees on Knots Landing. Everyone is on cue: the peacemaking drunk of a mom, the overbearing/rageaholic dad, the distant older brother, the little sister who’s too depressed to know she’s a knockout. Every other chapter is an entry from the diary of Helen, the dead older sister; she penned the entries while dying of cancer. Jessie, the little sister, is reading the diary to understand Helen’s death. Helen too is on cue: she’s a mild-mannered virgin who longs to be mother and wife. She wants to be a writer of the Anne Shirley school.Of Helen, Jessie says: “She slipped through our fingers like a sunny day. We thought it’d be summer forever.” O the agony! I was a little disappointed that Helen’s first entry was of the “I-secretly-want-you-to-read-this” variety; a little voyeurism would have been titillating. I didn’t cry while reading this; I’m not sure why. Reading all these tearjerkers, I realize I’m let down when I don’t. My favorite characters were Bloomfield, Helen’s stormy stud of a boyfriend, and Bambi, a “chubette” whose “eyes looked like the scene of a tragic forest fire.”
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