Flyaway

I started reading this book while I was away on a business trip. It didn't grab me at all and I can't put my finger on why. I have read plenty of fiction for teen girls from the pithy to the deeper more sensitive. This was well written and should have been very readable for me, but I struggled to keep going with it.

I have read it all now, it became easier to identify with the main character in the story as the book went along. This is a story of obsession, first love and illness and truly by the end it is very touching indeed.

Isla's best friend has left the school and moved away. She is feeling very vulnerable when her Dad seems to be getting ill. One day when Isla and her Dad are looking for the group of whooper swans which used to roost in her Grandad's lake her Dad collapses and Isla calls an ambulance. Her Dad is taken to hospital and while she is not allowed in to see him, Isla bumps into a boy named Harry. He stays on the Children's cancer ward and is waiting for a new series of Chemo and a bone-marrow transplant. They become friends, especially after he watches her down by the lake outside the hospital trying to find one of the swans.

This is not a quick thriller and it's not as easily readable as something like "Girl, Aloud" which we reviewed recently. It takes time building up the characters, which even by the end of the book still feel a little distant. The plot also moves quite slowly at first, it does pick up a little towards the middle of the book.

This is a beautiful little first-love romance between Isla and Harry, it explores her feelings towards him, and at the same time her feelings for another boy, one of her brothers friends. At the same time there is the jealousy she feels because her brother appears to have a girlfriend, and yet she, at first, has no-one.

There are many other strands of the story though. The idea of Grandad who won't visit his son in hospital, there is also difficulty in school with her best friend having moved away and a vulnerable loneliness that is expressed wonderfully on the page. In the end I rather enjoyed the story and I was glad that I stuck with it to the end. This is some beautifully written prose, although for me the story never really grabbed me 100%.