Ayun Halliday

I’m a cautious traveler but even so, things sometimes go wrong. I’m amazed Ayun Halliday is still alive. In her traveling career, she just roars into the unknown with no money, forethought, food, or common sense. From wandering through a midnight jungle searching for a wedding to instead being attacked by a pack of dogs, to buying mystery drugs from a sketchy salesman in Vietnam, to being assaulted by an angry madam for snapping pics of working girls in Amsterdam’s red light district, show more to dislocating her knee miles from help in Indonesia, she’s certainly had her share of misadventures. I can’t wing it. She’s braver than I am. show less

Sadie is about to start a new school for the umpteenth time and when she doesn't immediately make friends at her new high school, she tries to make herself seem more interesting by saying she has a life-threatening peanut allergy. Once she does make some great new friends and starts dating a caring boyfriend, the lie hovers over her head all the time like a dark cloud.

This book read like a breeze as it is short and light. Although the characters are high schoolers, this is a much lighter YA show more novel than most and could work well for older middle school kids as well. For the most part, it rang fairly true, although perhaps there was a smidge too much stereotyping (e.g., the one-note "mean girls" of the school).

Without being overly preachy, the book shows how even one lie can wreak a lot of havoc and have serious consequences. Other positive messages to this book include portrayals of a mostly healthy relationship between Sadie and her boyfriend as well as between Sadie and her mother.

The mainly black and white sketch drawings are fitting to the book and do a good job expressing the various emotions of the characters. The main character of the book being the only one with a pink/red shirt and thus standing out from the crowd was perhaps a little too on the nose though.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into this but being the aunt of child with a genuine peanut allergy, I can't help but be a little concerned that this book's premise adds fuel to the fire of critics who claim that people with allergies are exaggerating or making it up altogether. I hope I'm wrong though. show less

Ayun Halliday may not make for the most sensible travel companion, but she is certainly one of the zaniest, with a knack for inserting herself (and her unwitting cohorts) into bizarre situations around the globe. Curator of kitsch and unabashed aficionada of pop culture, Halliday offers bemused, self-deprecating narration of events from guerilla theater in Romania to drug-induced Apocalypse Now reenactments in Vietnam to a perhaps more surreal collagen-implant demonstration at a Paris show more fashion show emceed by Lauren Bacall. From taming the wild dog packs of Bali to requiring the services of a bonesetter in Sumatra, Ayun Halliday offers up the best of her itinerant foibles as examples of how not to travel abroad. For instance, on layover in Amsterdam, Halliday finds unlikely trouble in the red-light district—eliciting the ire of a tiny, violent madam,—and is forced to explain tampons, which she admits, “might have looked like white cotton bullets lined up in their box,†to soldiers in Kashmir—“They’re for ladies. Bleeding ladies.†A self-admittedly bumbling vacationer, Halliday shares—with razorsharp wit and to hilarious effect—the travel stories most are too self-conscious to tell. show less

Sadie tells a whopper of a lie in order to fit in at her new high school: She tells people she has a peanut allergy. She even goes as far as ordering a medical bracelet and looks into ordering an epipen. But managing her new life and friendships under the cloud of deception proves much more daunting than Sadie expected. You can't believe what she's trying to do but the authors present Sadie in a sympathetic light that has readers seeing her side of the story. Her palpable guilt rings true, show more as does the teen scene at school. This book very effectively considers the consequences of deception. Lib note: Passing references to White Russian cocktails, illustration of giving the finger, and a crack about fake orgasms, all perfectly within context but making this more suitable for promoting to high schoolers rather than middle school. show less