Peanut

I love Halliday's writing but this left me underwhelmed. ( )

Sadie wants to stand out at her new school and decides that faking a peanut allergy is the way to be cool and unique. After a couple "near-misses" with peanut-filled foods, her secret finally comes out and she experiences the consequence of losing most of her new friends. Halliday also includes a sweet romance between Sadie and her new friend Zoo. Sadie stands out in the black-and-white cartoons with her bright pink shirt as the only color. Although the beginning, with its information on peanut allergies, feels a bit didactic in spite of being told through Sadie's voice and interactions, the ensuing story and characters are believable. For other graphic novels about school and relationships, try Drama by Raina Telgemeier or Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol. ( )

Maybe I missed it but I was never quite clear on why Sadie invented her peanut allergy. ( )

Sadie has moved a lot, so now that she's transferring to a new high school, she makes sure to tell everyone that she has a peanut allergy. It helps her make a couple of friends, and the new school is going pretty well for her. Then she accidentally eats something that has nuts in it, and everyone finds out what happens to her: absolutely nothing. Because she made it up.

It lacks the warmth and depth of similar school-based friendship-oriented stories like Raina Telgemeier's Smile or Drama, but I think it can fit in with the same audience. The awkwardness of being The New Kid, of finding friends who aren't the cool kids... hard NOT to relate to! ( )

Richie's Picks: PEANUT by Ayun Halliday and Paul Hoppe, ill., Schwartz & Wade, January 2013, 216p., ISBN: 978-0-375-86590-9

"A peanut sat on a railroad track
His heart was all a-flutter.
Along came the 6:15
Toot! Toot! Peanut butter!
--old camp song

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
--George Bernard Shaw

When Sadie Wildhack moves to a new community -- yet again -- with her mother, just before the onset of her sophomore year of high school, she settles upon a bold, if misguided, strategy for winning friends and influencing people: Having met someone in her previous town who was dealing with a potentially life-threatening peanut allergy, Sadie decides to go online and buy herself a medical alert bracelet that will serve as her entree into the peanut allergy club.

"Before you write me off as some kind of messed-up delusional psycho...think about what it's like to be thrown into a situation where everyone knows everyone....and no one knows you.”

Sadie's dramatically recreating herself in this manner does, indeed, yield her some new friends and, more importantly, nets her a boyfriend. Zoo is a cute, anti-tech rebel who is very attentive to her.

But there are consequences to having a severe peanut allergy -- even if it is not a real one -- and the author does an excellent job of probing a variety of situations that can arise (and go awry) for Sadie. The close-calls with reality have Sadie longing to come clean, but she's got so much invested in her fictitious condition that she finds it impossible to 'fess up.

Written in graphic novel form, PEANUT is a ticking time bomb of a contemporary tween tale, that will have readers becoming more and more certain that the next complication will surely expose Sadie's deception for all the world to see.

The illustrations for PEANUT are rendered in black and white except for Sadie's various tops, which are all done in red. For those of us who are not seasoned readers of graphic novels, this artwork permits us to effortlessly focus in on Sadie, even when she is situated amidst a bunch of students.

It is healthy and essential for adolescents to be trying on different identities. PEANUT shows us how sometimes an identity can come equipped with some pretty heavy baggage.

Richie Partington, MLIS
Richie's Picks http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com
Moderator http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/
http://slisweb.sjsu.edu/people/faculty/partingtonr/partingtonr.php ( )