{"id":1990,"date":"2008-05-11T17:15:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-11T17:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/?p=1990"},"modified":"2018-11-20T05:28:58","modified_gmt":"2018-11-20T05:28:58","slug":"to-be-or-not-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/?p=1990","title":{"rendered":"To Be, Or… Not To"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2026Or Not?<\/a>
by Brian Mandabach<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to love your whole life, Cassie. Each moment is the only thing that\u2019s real. If you damn even one moment, you risk damning the whole thing. Think about it. Each moment arises and then slips away so quickly \u2013 if you\u2019re not living in the present, if you\u2019re living in the past or for the future, you\u2019ll miss it, because now happens only once.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s more than good advice. It\u2019s the best advice Cassie Sullivan\u2019s ever heard. Unfortunately, by the time she hears it, she\u2019s already shot herself in the foot.<\/p>\n

From her staunch refusal to listen to CD\u2019s because \u2018digital music sounds robotic,\u2019 and isn\u2019t real, to her strict vegan diet, to her hatred for suburban life and her longing to live alone in the woods, Cassie is an original. Brilliant, moody, perceptive and interested in truly thinking about world events, Cassie has gotten dangerously bored in school, especially since her defense of Darwin has gotten her labeled as the school antichrist, and her refusal to sing so-called \u201cpatriotic\u201d songs for a September 11th Memorial assembly has gotten her nicknamed \u2018Osama O\u2019Sullivan\u2019 and kicked out of show choir. In a fever of what they assume is patriotism, Cassie\u2019s classmates react, and make her life a nightmare. Cassie withdraws into her journal, rereading Tolkien and the writing of Kurt Cobain, and writing stories which concern the adults around her.<\/p>\n

Even if she\u2019s the school outcast, she can survive the hundreds of notes shoved into her locker, the hazing the abuse, and losing her few friends. Even if the teachers don\u2019t like her and her parents aren\u2019t sure what\u2019s up with her, she can survive, right? But the question ringing in Cassie\u2019s head asks if anything is worth the hassle \u2013 if anything good remains to be saved, if anyone still has a conscience, a heart, and a brain in the hypersensitive, post-September 11th world around her.
To be, \u2026or not? Suddenly, that\u2019s the only question.<\/p>\n

Though Brian Mandabach creates in Cassie a character very unlike the average middle school student, the voice is real. Sarcastic, self-righteous, and idealistic, Cassie struggles with becoming, and also with being brighter than everyone else and despising them \u2013 and herself \u2013 for various reasons. Themes of depression, prejudice, peer pressure and religious conservatism are familiar territory in YA fiction, but older readers may find that Mandabach allows Cassie and some of her detractors to get off a little too easily. While she has been brought up to be a critical thinker, Cassie is remarkably rigid and refuses to allow that others have reasons for their negative behavior \u2013 most notably, fear– and immaturity makes her miss this \u2013 and her own fear, entirely. Still, solid writing and a nonconformist heroine may make Cassie a kindred spirit to other teens fighting toward maturity.<\/p>\n

This review was first published in the March\/April ’08 issue of The Edge of the Forest<\/a> Children’s Literature Monthly. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2026Or Not? by Brian Mandabach \u201cYou have to love your whole life, Cassie. Each moment is the only thing that\u2019s real. If you damn…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[108,25,5],"class_list":["post-1990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-edge-of-the-forest","tag-problem-novels","tag-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1990"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4903,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1990\/revisions\/4903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}