BookChick.com Recommends SHARK GIRL
SHARK GIRL by Kelly Bingham is a fast and unusual read. It’s written in verse (a style I increasingly love because you can read it so quickly) and it’s told by a girl who loses her arm in a shark attack. It’s a heartfelt story about what it means to lose something precious. That’s obvious, right? I mean, we’re talking about an arm here! Somehow, the author manages to convey precisely how it would feel to live with only one arm, the likely awkwardness, the new skills that must be learned. Particularly poignant is the narrator’s relationship with her mother and her brother, who treats her the same and who eventually just says, “I don’t care how many limbs you have. You need to help me with chores.” (He doesn’t quite put it like that, but you get the idea.) Because what the narrator wants more than anything is to be treated as a person, not as a person missing an arm.
SHARK GIRL is probably won’t be the first book you think of to buy or read. But if you do either, you won’t regret it.
