Candlewick Press
March 2007
$14.95 AU
69p pb
ISBN:
978-0763633660
fp September 2003
Almost Forever
Maria Testa
from the book...
Doctor’s don’t fight; doctors heal. Nevertheless, the young narrator of Maria Testa’s lyric novel Almost Forever must watch her father march off to Vietnam, where he’ll serve a year in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. A year is a long time to a child. A year is a long time when you’re waiting for letters, waiting for word. A year becomes endless when you don’t know where your father is anymore. A year feels like forever when you’re wondering … and forgetting.
Maria Testa, the author of Becoming Joe DiMaggio and Some Kind of Pride, has written a taut and tender American ballad of one family’s experience during what would become the turning point in both U.S. involvement in South Vietnam and American public opinion.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
Almost
Forever
is a partly happy and partly sad story about a family who on Christmas
Night
1967 received a letter saying their father has to go and take care of
the sick
and injured who fought in the war in
“Doctors
don’t fight,” daddy said, “we take care of the people who get hurt in
the
fighting”. “Doctors get hurt, too,” Mama needed to say. “Bullets and
bombs do not care that you went to medical school.”
Every
day the two children run to the mailbox to read the letters that daddy
has sent.
But suddenly daddy has stopped sending letters! What has happened to
the
children’s father? Has he been hurt? Has he been captured? Is he
DEAD??? Read
this book to find out what happens.
Danica,
age 11, Canberra, Australia
Almost Forever is
a mind compelling verse novel that is short but uses
emotional power to
every advantage. I for one really enjoyed the way Maria Testa had used
a
different text style to most other books; she used a more lyric/poetic
theme
which had captivated me from when I started reading until I put the
book down. Almost
Forever uses a young girl’s perspective on a war which makes the
reader
feel a sorrow for the young girl and her lonely brother and mum waiting
for
their father to walk home through the door, alive. Almost
Forever is a quick read, consisting of 69 pages, but uses every
page to
express emotion through personal thoughts and short sayings that really
create
the mood for this story.
Overall,
I think that Maria Testa has outdone herself with Almost
Forever and I recommend this verse novel to anybody that
likes a quick but powerful read. I give this novel a 4/5.
Fil, Year 10, Canberra, Australia