2012 book 327

Annabel Pitcher's My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece
Sooo this book is basically a huge bummer. It's about a ten-year-old boy whose older sister (one of a set of twins) was killed in a terrorist bombing in London, and now it's five years later, their mother has left them, their dad is a racist drunk, and his poor anorexic pink-haired sister is trying to keep everything together. And then he starts a new school and the only person nice to him is a Muslim girl, so things are obviously going to go badly. The characters are fine (I obviously loved pink-haired Jas, and Sunya was great as well) but the beats of the story feel pretty predictable. A reality show is shoe-horned in, and (spoilers) something terrible happens to his cat, which sucked to read. It does end on an up note but man was it depressing. B.