Every Little Thing in the World

March 1, 2010
Sixteen-year-old Sydney has just learned that a casual fling has left her pregnant (“I hadn't felt like I knew him well enough to remind him about the condom issue”). When Sydney's best friend Natalia steals her mother's car to take Sydney to confront the father, the girls are caught, and Sydney's father signs Sydney up for a one-month canoe trip to help her rethink her life's direction. And Sydney does plenty of thinking, even after Natalia finagles her way onto the wilderness trip, which comes with some physical and emotional highs and lows. Sydney's turmoil about the pregnancy (she's kept it from her parents and plans to have an abortion when she returns) is realistic and well plotted; she faces added pressure from Natalia who, after revelations about her own birth circumstances, partly sees herself in Sydney's baby. Sydney's complex relationships with her single mother and idealistic but distant father are authentic and poignant. In her first novel for teens, de Gramont ably captures Sydney's reflective journey from a passive girl to a young woman ready to make the biggest decision of her life. Ages 14–up.

April 1, 2010
Gr 9 Up-Friends Sydney and Natalia, both 16, are sent to a wilderness camp to canoe the waters of northern Canada for six weeks. They have secrets: Sydney is pregnant, and Natalia has just found out that her older sister, Margit, is actually her biological mother. Other campers also have secrets. Brendan, a hot TV-soap star, is hiding his sexual orientation; and on a dare the gritty, tattooed Mick reveals that he killed a man. While the campers paddle, cook, and have adventures, Sydney ponders her predicament. She didn't have much of a relationship with the unborn child's father, and at one point during the trip she contemplates sleeping with a fellow camper to dupe him into paying for an abortion. After a night of drinking, she briefly considers a belly flop as the fix. Natalia recognizes the enormity of Margit's decision to give birth as a teenager, and she extracts a promise from Sydney that she will have the baby, assuring her that she will help, but the troubled teen must ultimately make her own decision. De Gramont introduces a lot of ancillary characters, and it's doubtful that readers will care about many of them, but the story moves along at a decent pace as it examines one teen's struggle to deal with an unplanned pregnancy."Patricia N. McClune, Conestoga Valley High School, Lancaster, PA"

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