Annotation: Celine is sixteen years old and a product of a divorced family. Celine's dream of becoming an artist and traveling to Italy are smashed when Jake steals a piece of her heart. How will she ever show signs of maturity with all these obstacles?
Justification for Rejection: Celine struggles to find her own identity while living with her step-mother, who is only six years older than she is. Celine's mother runs off with different men and leaves her with her father, who is always off on a business trip. Her father in turn, leaves her with her step-mother who is busy completing her college education.
Where do I fit, where do I belong, who loves me, and what about fear of rejection and abandonment? These are some of the serious issues that are never addressed in this maladaptive novel. If I were Celine, I should think I would have far more emotional problems that Cole lacks to describe in this playful book. Celine seems to wonder around in her own teenage mind of existence, as well as physically. The adults in her life consistently harp on her to 'show some maturity' and then we will reward you(19). This becomes an oxymoron due to the circumstances. She is quite mature and actually glides through many of her obstacles, not by any help from the adults.
From teachers to parents to step-mother and even the divorcee next door, who consistently dumps her six year old, Jake, off at her own convenience, for Celine to watch, scolds her when things don't go the adults way. Celine even took care of her girlfriend, Lucille, when she got drunk and threw-up in her sweater. She got the blame for that and nothing seems to effect her. Celine appears quite mature and very well adjusted, something I find pretty amazing and unusual for a sixteen year old with her circumstances and no supervision. Either the author over-looked her emotional development as a teen or Celine is an exceptional child.
The vocabulary that Cole uses for the protagonist reaches far beyond the way a sixteen year old would speak, especially for one who is failing English Literature and cannot complete her essay on "Cather in the Rye". This puzzled me, as the vernacular did not seem to fit with the character nor the setting. Nothing extravagant happens in the novel, in other words, there were no real experiential insights about humanity as a complex nature discovered here. In fact, it lacked in extraneous drama, she did not learn anything meaningful about humanity and any new way to function in that world. The only realistic feature would have been the orphan character that may or may not have the primal fear of abandonment, however, it did not seem to bother Celine to determine any change in her life. Most likely, I will not read this book again because the novel did not resonate with me as an adult nor as a teenager.
Genre: Teen Fiction, Coming of Age, Search for Identity.
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