- Title:
- Apple and Rain
- By:
- Sarah Crossan
- Pages:
- 330
- Rating:
- 5
When Apple’s mother returns after eleven years away, Apple feels whole again. But just like the stormy Christmas Eve when she left, her mother’s homecoming is bittersweet. It’s only when Apple meets someone more lost than she is that she begins to see things as they really are.
A story about sad endings.
A story about happy beginnings.
A story to make you realise who is special.
Wow. I’d never even heard of Sarah Crossan and a student I met for the first time today said how good this book was. Move over, literati – she was spot on. This is quite possibly the most perfect teen novel I have ever read. Of course, it’s not my usual fair, but there’s so much in here to enjoy (not just the frumious Bandersnatch and the hallowed words of our marvellous, unquantifiably rich heritage) but there’s a reservoir of deep-running realism, a glimpse into a family filtered through the achingly realistic thoughts and feelings of a young girl herself painted so beautifully and genuinely it’s hard not to melt into the pages and feel as if, for a little while, you’re hearing all this poured out at you from Apple herself.
It’s the sort of novel I could read paragraph by paragraph, deconstruct and analyse six ways to Sunday, and I must confess that I stopped reading and breathed in the poetry (I’ve always enjoyed reading poetry, and guiltily mouthing it to myself made me feel young again). It is a world away – perhaps a universe away from my usual style of book, I enjoy the thrills and the spaceships, the spies and the geeks. But this seemed to cut through to a part of me that isn’t ordinarily brought out into the world very often. Any book that can do that has to be worth £4.00.