Forever Changes (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Forever Changes Deborah Stevenson Halpin, Brendan; Forever Changes. Farrar, 2008; [192p] ISBN 978-0-374-32436-0 $16.95 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 7–10 Senior year is hard enough for anybody, but Brianna faces particular challenges: she’s just gotten out of the hospital after her cystic fibrosis again left her with a serious lung infection, and she’s struggling with the ubiquitous emphasis on college in the face of her increasing conviction that she’s not likely to live long enough to get a degree—or even attend. She finds some distraction in math, her favorite subject; she also sees in Mr. Eccles, her new math teacher, a bit of a kindred spirit, and develops a friendship with nerdy Adam, who sits next to her in math class, but will any of this provide her with the answers she’s seeking? Literature has featured the dying young person before and with much success, but Halpin has a particularly clear-eyed sense of the strangeness of Brianna’s situation. Her musings on her truncated legacy (“You guys are the best friends I’ll ever have in my whole life, you’ll never be less than that to me, and I’m on my way to being just somebody you used to know, that poor girl”) are simultaneously poignant and plausible, especially in light of the recent death of Brianna’s own CF mentor; she’s a believably real girl, not just a tear-jerking sacrifice. However, the prose tends to be labored, veering awkwardly between overliterality and underexplanation, and the story doesn’t really braid its events together effectively; the secondary characters are more functional than dimensional (it’s especially difficult to tell the female characters apart). There’s still plenty of emotion, though, in the story of a young woman whose time is measurable if not mathematically knowable, and readers will be drawn by that affecting theme. [End Page 19] Copyright © 2008 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois