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Ways To Live Forever

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Ways To Live Forever

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Overview

From award-winning author Sally Nicholls, her debut novel about a boy's last months with leukemia.1. My name is Sam.2. I am eleven years old.3. I collect stories and fantastic facts.4. I have leukemia.5. By the time you read this, I will probably be dead.Living through the final stages of leukemia, Sam collects stories, questions, lists, and pictures that create a profoundly moving portrait of how a boy lives when he knows his time is almost up.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780545365796
Publisher:	Scholastic, Inc.
Publication date:	03/01/2013
Sold by:	Scholastic, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
Lexile:	580L (what's this?)
File size:	7 MB
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Sally Nicholls completed an MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University (UK). She wrote her first novel, WAYS TO LIVE FOREVER, when she was twenty-three, and it received three starred reviews and was named an ALA Notable Book. Sally Nicholls lives in London.

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Editorial Reviews

This year's answer to 2007's Before I Die, this first novel written by a 23-year-old Brit likewise features a young narrator with incurable cancer-and, while it doesn't entirely escape the conventions of the dying-child novel, it skirts easy sentiment to confront the hard questions head-on, intelligently and realistically and with an enormous range of feeling. Sam, facing his third recurrence of leukemia at the age of 11, keeps a journal, and among his entries are facts, questions and lists: "Questions Nobody Answers No. 1 - How do you know that you've died?"; "True facts about coffins"; "Why does God make kids get ill?" Sam starts out with a buddy, another terminally ill boy who shares Sam's sense of humor and who with Sam is taught by a visiting teacher ("No dying at the table, Felix," she tells him in the opening scene when he is mocking melodramatic portrayals of "the poor, frail child... struggling bravely"). How Sam and his family cope with Felix's death and Sam's own inevitable decline-ultimately, with humor, grace and generosity of spirit-will bring on tears; more impressively, it will also help readers address the hard questions for themselves. Ages 9-12. (Sept.)
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Publishers Weekly

Gr 4-7
Eleven-year-old Sam knows that he is dying from leukemia. He has decided to write a book that includes his thoughts on the matter as well as his lists and his questions, particularly those that no one ever answers like, "Why does God let kids get ill?" Through his writing, Nicholls has drawn a portrait of a family coping with a child's terminal disease. Readers meet Sam's mother, father, and younger sister, each of whom is dealing in a different way with his illness. Well researched and beautifully written, the book is equal to the best of children's literature about death and dying, Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia (HarperCollins, 1977) and Deborah Wiles's Each Little Bird That Sings (Harcourt, 2005). Sam knows that his father rushes off to work each day because he cannot admit to himself that his son is dying. He knows that his mother keeps Ella home from school during an unexpected snowstorm in March so they can have one last sledding day together. But, he does not verbalize this knowledge, just as his parents and Ella don't speak of his death. Sam is a child whom readers would want as a friend and he will be missed when the book is done.-Wendy Smith-D'Arezzo, Loyola College, Baltimore, MD

School Library Journal

"If I grow up," 11-year-old Sam informs readers, "I'm going to be a scientist." He says "if" because he has acute lymphoblastic leukemia and knows he probably won't. With the encouragement of his tutor, he starts to write a bit about himself, then more, until he is using his writing to sort out his death. Interspersed with Sam's lists, questions and odd bits of mortality facts on notebook paper, his narrative proceeds in short, candid chapters that reveal a boy who, though he's not ready to die, nevertheless can confront the reality with heartbreaking clarity. As his parents wrangle about treatment (he doesn't want it), his little sister grapples with the changes to the household and his best friend and fellow cancer-sufferer dies, Sam methodically works through the things he wants to do before he dies, from going up a down escalator to the more problematic ride in an airship and seeing the earth from space. Nicholls's debut skillfully avoids bathos at every turn, sketching a fully-formed character readers will be glad they've met and sorry to bid farewell. (Fiction. 9-13)

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