Henry Holt and Company
November 2002
$16.95US
100p hb
ISBN: 978-0805071276
After The Death Of Anna Gonzales
Terri Fields
from the book...
Anna
Gonzales is dead. Suicide. Here, in forty-seven voices, are those left
behind.
They live to tell what is still to come.
Brutally honest and powerfully affecting, this richly textured and moving testimony resonates with both pain and hope. It will stay with readers long after they put it down.
If you have read this verse novel and would like to share your opinion of it with other readers please send your review or comments to YARR-A
This
is a very serious verse novel with its main theme being suicide. This
book is
about Anna Gonzales’ death. It is written by a collection of people who
knew
her as a friend, or wanted to know her. It is a recount of previous
things that
they did together or things that they never got to do together. This is
a very
powerful book because it explains how each person will miss Anna
Gonzales.
I
really liked this book because of the way it was written showing a
different
person’s perspective on how they knew Anna. I found this to be a very
powerful
book that dealt with many themes that most teenagers deal with. Since
it deals
with many teenage problems I would recommend it to teenagers and I give
it 5 out
of 5 stars.
I just
finished the book. My daughter asked me to return it to the library for
her
today, but I decided to read it first.
I am a
secretary in a very small school. I plan to purchase a copy for our
small school
library.
Paula,
Ohio
After
the death of Anna Gonzales is a unique novel, which deals with realistic teenage
issues. The novel
is from forty-seven different classmates, peers and teachers
perspective of how
the sudden death of Anna affected them. They share their feelings,
thoughts and
traumatic anguish they suffered through poetry and testimonies.
Anna
Gonzales might have been a fictional character, but there are many
teenagers and
youth of today who can relate to the emotive thoughts and words Anna
wrote and
spoke. Anna’s sudden death shocked everyone, from teachers to students,
family
members to the community. She wasn’t well known, and not many of her
peers got
the opportunity to ever approach her or even talk to her.
This
novel is very intense and meaningful, it made me personally realise,
you
shouldn’t take people and things in life for granted. Furthermore, it
made me
think of the things we value in life and how materialistic our society
has
become; most of today’s generation only talk to certain people purely
based on
looks, sense of style and friendship groups.
When
writing this story Terri Fields was very creative in the way she used
the
students emotions and daunting memories about Anna to write out the
verses of
the novel. She also used a very cleaver combination of characters, some
of which
knew Anna, didn’t know Anna, were friends with her, had a crush on her
and so
on.
I
really enjoyed reading this novel, because I found it to be realistic
and you
could actually imagine yourself in a situation like that, whether its
Anna’s
pains and feelings your enduring or one of the students. Personally I’d
recommend this novel to people who are aged 13+. I would do this based
on the
reason that After The Death of Anna Gonzales is a serious
novel, in which
you have to see past the text in order to appreciate the full worth of
the book.
Out of 10 I give this novel 8.5.
Mamta, Year 10, Canberra, Australia