Really... I'm not her

I finished the kindle download of I'm Not Her - Janet Gurtler just minutes ago. I usually will get the my opinion out right after I finish reading whatever it is I am reading at the time, only because I want to remember everything I have read and what I actually thought about the book before it gets lost in my mommy-mind of every day chores and whatnot.

So this first person narrative is about a fifteen year old girl named Tess Smith. She is a very smart girl in school. She has her mind set on her getting into the Honor Society. She also decides to enter an art contest to win a scholar ship to an art school. Every thing is going as planned.

That is until one day when her sister, Kristina, goes to a doctors appointment and learns she has Osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer. Her sister gets depressed and doesn't go back to school and turns all her friends away that she had at school. That in turn makes everyone flock to Tess just to find out what is going on with her sister. Tess at first was told by her sister not to disclose anything to her sister's friends. It made Tess very awful for lying to everyone.

In the midst of all this one of the Seniors, Nick, starts hanging out with her. So does another boy, Clark, that is in Tess' class. Nick comes from a home with abuse. His father is a drunk. They live in a rundown small house. Clark is a smart kid as well as Tess. They are both trying to get into Honor Society. Clark notices that Tess hasn't been getting to all her classes and wonders why, but doesn't ask. He protects when Tess is able to tell Kristina's friends what is going on.

With her sister having cancer, she has to step up and be strong for her father who never comes home, and her mother who just goes crazy because the dreams her oldest daughter had and she wanted for her too are gone. Even more so when Kristina loses her leg.


What happens is Tess feels like she and her dreams of what she wants has been placed on the back burner because her sister comes first in the eyes of her parents. More so in the eyes of her mother, since her father is hardly around. She loses out on Honor Society because her mother asks her to miss classes to be with her sister at the hospital. Classes she needed to be in to get her homework assignments in order to complete them.

To find out where this story goes you will have to read it for yourself. I got my kindle download for free at amazon.com. Could still be free, who knows. Worth checking out.

I have to say this book touched me in more ways than one. It let me in to see what a couple of my family members might have experienced when they were fighting the cancers they had. a couple of the relatives are still alive. A few have passed away. Let me just say each time finding out a different person in my family had be told they had some type of cancer didn't make it any easier hearing the news. This is a hard subject to talk about. I'm sure I will come across a few more on my kindle with sort of the same subject. It might not be a YA/teen novel, but it could be in another genre of writing.

I would like to thank those who are taking the time to read everything I writing here. I have a major love for books. I get in trouble by my husband every time I bring in more books. He threatens playfully to burn them all. 

Thank you for reading. Any questions, comments, or recommendations are welcome.