Breaking Up

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do is the second book in the young adult Miracle Girls series. Anne Dayton and May Vanderbilt collaborate on these truthful books about four high school girls making their way through the classes, cliques, and competition of their sophomore year. I read this book in about 3 hours. Although it is a young adult novel, I was interested to learn about Christine, the narrator, and her three friends. They have spent almost all of the summer as a group, and are now returning to school where they have other groups of friends based on different interests such as cheerleading, art, and band. Christine is very concerned that bringing other friends into the mix will break up the Miracle Girls, hence the title. If that happens, Christine feels she will have no one in her life with whom she can talk openly. From her point of view, that is a definite possibility. Christine was devastated to walk away from the car crash that killed her mother on impact a year ago. She is an only child, and her father is away on business for weeks at a time. When he is home, he is very busy making goo-goo eyes at his fiancee Candace, a former Miss California.
As I see this in writing, I realize that the premise could seem like a cheesy teenage angst story, which it definitely is not. On the surface these are all facts of the characters' lives, but internally there is so much more. Candace tries to befriend Christine without hovering while she worries about Christine's relationship with her distant father. Christine also has Emma, who is in middle school and loves her own father very much. Emma and Christine become friends, although they are polar opposites in many ways, Emma being a costant bubble of joyful energy and Christine being the soul-searching artist with a pierced nose.
On top of the family trying to cohere and the friends spending less time together there is the ever present issue of boys. Some friends have boyfriends, does Andrew like Christine or just admire her as an artist, should a boyfriend be a part of your family life or separate, all the issues we are learning at this age.
I enjoyed Christine's journey through her sophomore year. It made me think more about a TV series on WE last year that documented the four high school years of several girls attending the same Kansas school. Seeing how they changed, the development of priorities, working on relationships with family and friends, learning the consequences of poor decisions was very interesting. What this book and the TV show, which are totally unrelated, teach people is that all is not how it seems in someone else's life. Everyone has struggles and we all make mistakes. Breaking Up Is Hard to Do by Anne Dayton and May Vanderbilt will be in stores this April. The Miracle Girls is the first book in the series and I'm going to read that soon. You might want to get it before you read the new one!