Whatever Doesn't Kill You

March 15, 2013
A girl struggles to understand the lasting effects of her father's murder on her family. Growing up in Ontario, social misfit Jenna has hated Travis Bingham all her life. Travis shot and killed her father when she was a baby. She blames him for her mother's mental illness and her family's poverty. When she learns that Travis has been released from prison, her friends urge her to confront him. Breaking with her longtime friends over the issue, Jenna finds herself befriended by a popular girl, who drags Jenna to the mall and uses her shopping sense to get Jenna a whole new wardrobe and haircut, jolting Jenna into a new perspective on herself. She begins to uncover unsettling clues about her family's past. When Jenna finally does meet Travis and gets him to talk about the past, an entirely new history opens up, calling into question many of her former beliefs. Wennick keeps her prose flowing nicely, and her characters come across as real people with strengths and flaws. Jenna's confusion and her determination to sort out her understanding of both herself and her history come through clearly and sympathetically. A solid, affecting coming-of-age tale. (Fiction. 12-16)

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July 1, 2013

Gr 7-10-Jenna was just days old when teenager Travis Bingham killed her father, an event that she believes set her family's breakdown in motion. Now, 15 years later, the murder still consumes her life, so much so that she loses her best friends. When Bingham is released on parole, Jenna becomes even more convinced that he is the key to her unanswered questions and feels that she must get the information to finally put the past behind her. What she doesn't expect to find out is that the murderer once lived with her family and that her brother, who has practically raised her, knows more about that fateful night than she could ever have imagined. Readers will be hooked from the first sentence and kept on the line by the quick-paced plot and easy-to-follow language. The story of Jenna, an outcast at school, with a not so normal family life is intriguing enough to hold the interest of even the most reluctant readers. Though the story seems to abruptly wrap up in a page or two, it is an overall good selection for those looking for a quick, heartening read.-Betsy Davidson, Cortland Free Library, NY

Copyright 2013 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2013
Grades 7-10 Jenna only knows her father from the family photograph above the television. When she was just an infant, he was killed in a convenience store robbery, and now Travis Bingham, the killer, is out of jail and back in town. With her family unwilling or unable to discuss the crime or its aftermath, and her friends alienated by her inability to move beyond her past, Jenna is left to deal with Travis on her own. But when she finally finds him, Jenna is unprepared for what she learns, and it puts her world on edge. This brief, taut novel is thick with Jenna's legitimate angst and understandable longing for answers. The juicy long-held family secrets and Jenna's absorbing obsession with the life she never got to live tend to make the side characters feel a bit one dimensional for much of the book, and the epilogue describes a sunnier solution than might be realistic. Still, though, this is a believable portrait of a family destroyed, destroyed again, and finally rebuilt.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)