Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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What is a friend? Who are your real friends?

Nowadays, we all have MySpace friends and listserve friends, IM friends and texting friends, in addition to our traditional school friends, neighborhood friends, and those we acquire over the years through a variety of life experiences.

For me, there was a girl with an abutting backyard with whom I played well when I was a preschooler, long-lost buddies in black and white photos from my earliest school days, the tall guy who befriended me on the playground following our family's move in the middle of my third grade year (I still know and visit him.), and a boy from Smithtown I met at daycamp with whom I remember walking with our arms around each other one summer. There were study friends and Boy Scout friends and the members of all the various extracurricular and social groups to which I belonged during high school. Being as old as I am, the list of old friends goes on and on and on.

But we might ask ourselves: How many of those friends "for whatever reason, are as much a part of you as your own soul"? And to how many people have we been such a friend?

"There are things I want to remember about Cameron Quick that I can't entirely, like the pajamas he wore when he used to sleep over, and his favorite cereal, or how it felt to hold his hand as we walked home from school in third grade. I want to remember exactly how we became friends in the first place, a definite starting line that I can visit again and again. He's a story I want to know from page one.
"My brain doesn't seem to work that way. Most specific things about Cameron are fuzzy -- the day we met, how we got so close, exact words we said to each other. There are only moments, snapshots, pieces of a puzzle. Once in a while I feel them right in my hand, real as the present, but usually it's more like I'm grasping for vapor. I understand that you can never have the whole picture; inevitably, there's stuff you don't know, can't know. But when it comes to Cameron I always want more than I have, would like to be able to take hold of at least one or two more pieces, if only because I'm convinced there are parts of myself hidden inside them."

As an impoverished elementary student in thrift store garb, Jennifer Harris is shunned by the schoolmates who tauntingly call her "Fattifer." Her closet eating habits -- which include frequently stealing food from schoolmates and stores -- are clearly the product of regularly being left to fend for herself by her single mom who is forever running between work and nursing school.

The one person in the world Jennifer can always depend on is her only friend and fellow outcast Cameron Quick. But Cameron has his own problems and secrets, including a nightmarish father as Jennifer learns first-hand that horrific day -- her ninth birthday -- when she visits Cameron's house to collect a present he has made for her.

Soon thereafter, Cameron and his family disappear and the eventual rumor at school is that he has moved away and then died. Jennifer's mother acknowledges that the rumor is, indeed, fact.

"The two questions came into my head again: How could you have left me? Why didn't you say good-bye?"

Eight years later, Jennifer Harris has reinvented herself into Jenna Vaughn, a teen who has determinedly shed her excessive weight and her former lack of composure. Her mother's remarriage has cleared up the former problems of poverty. Jenna attends a charter school where she has popular friends and a popular boyfriend: ("Sometimes I worried that I should be feeling more for him than I actually did, but I tended to push those worries aside and focus on how it felt to be part of it, to be seen by everyone as worthy of couplehood").

Eight years after she last sees him, Cameron Quick suddenly and inexplicably reappears in Jenna/Jennifer's life just as precipitously as he had disappeared from it. The presence of Cameron will compel her to determine whether she is Jenna or Jennifer.

I was thoroughly caught up in the tale of SWEETHEARTS, a story of a once-in-a-lifetime friendship and what has befallen the two long-lost friends as they pursued their radically divergent paths through childhood and adolescence. It is a book that sure has me contemplating relationships with friends past and present.

Richie Partington, MLIS
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