Classics, Nonfiction, and Children's Literature
In My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult (Washington Square Press, 2005), thirteen-year-old Anna sues her parents for bodily autonomy. Although she’s not sick, she’s had a dozen hospital stays and medical interventions throughout her life, all in the name of saving her older sister, Kate, who has leukemia. To complicate matters, her mother and father
The graphic novel memoir Stitches by David Small (W.W. Norton, 2009) haunts the reader with stories from David’s troubled childhood in stark black, white, and gray illustrations. David’s childhood seems oppressive, and the variety of perspectives that David uses to show the seas of faces around him gives an added feel of overwhelm that correlates
The Fault in Our Stars by John Greene (Dutton Books, 2014) is both an existential novel about the meaningless of life as well as a sensitive exploration of the importance of friendship in the midst of the seemingly meaningless. Hazel is a 16-year-old girl with cancer, miraculously kept alive by a “miracle” drug that could
Samson’s Tale by Carla Mooney and illustrated by Kathleen Spade (Story Pie Press, 2011) is a sensitive story about a boy dealing with recovery from leukemia, as viewed from the perspective of his best friend, his dog Samson. By telling the story from the dog’s perspective, there is an appropriate distance for the reader, thus avoiding melodrama
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