Title: Angie and Me

Since I mentioned this in my previous entry, I thought I would go ahead and write about it. Unfortunately, I do not own this book! Fortunately, it is available at quite a few libraries yet.

Here is the cover. As you can see, the cover looks like a pencil drawing with two other colors involved, yellow and green. It really looks very hospitalish with those colors, too. It was published in 1981, almost two years before I read it for the first time.

When I was 8 years old and in third grade, we were on our weekly visit to the school library. In my elementary school, the library was housed in the cafeteria! The stacks were around the perimeter of the room, with the rows of lunch tables in the middle. Anyway, I remember looking to see if any Judy Blume books were in (no, they were all out) and then started looking for something else that might be interesting. That's when I discovered this book.

Right away, I was intrigued by the "blurb" on the book jacket. It begins: "Jenna is adamant." This lined hooked me. What in the world did 'adamant' mean? I had to find out. It turned out that she has Juvenile Rhuematoid Arthritis, and would spend some time in the hospital over the summer to get it under control.

I started reading this book, and this is the first time that I actually stayed up really late so that I could finish the book. I even read under the covers. I had to find out what happened to Jenna and Angie. It was also the first book I ever cried while reading. However, there were plenty of funny parts. As a fairly naiive reader, this was also the first time that I realized that someone could write things in a book such as this example from page 19, "When Mrs. Anderson came around the desk to inspect me more closely, I gulped. I'd never seen such an enormous woman. Her breasts were about the size of basketballs."

It never occurred to me until many, many years later - when I was in my 20s - that cortisone is a steroid and that is could be similar to prednisone. In my preteen and teen years, I took prednison on and off for my asthma episodes. It never occurred to me that this medication could have led to my weight gain. However, in this book, Jenna is on cortisone for her JRA, and she starts looking "puffy". She and Angie have a whole conversation about this. I thought it was funny at the time.

On the last page (113), there was another term that I did not understand as an 8-year-old (but it never occurred to me to ask anyone about). Here is the quote:
" 'Maybe I won't do it today,' I said, 'and maybe I'll need a souped-up wheelchair to do it, but I'm going to fly this kite all by myself.' "

What did "souped-up" mean? I remember wondering back then what that meant. I didn't really think that meant a wheelchair covered in soup (although that was a funny mental picture to me), but what else could it mean? And let's look the the third to last sentence of the book: "Yoyo looked at me like she was trying to figure out what size straight jacket I should wear." I do realize I was perhaps a very naive 8-year-old, but I really had no idea what a straight jacket was, and why one would be needed. At that time, I figured that if it was like the beautiful Scandenavian wool sweater my aunt had given me that made me break out in hives and was forever torturing me, then I wouldn't want a straight jacket.

Really, this is a very good book. Jenna learns how to deal with different people in the hospital, and gains a lot of maturity for an almost-12 year old. She deals with making new friends and loses one to death (Jenna screams for a long time when she finds out). I have never met anyone else who has said they've read this book, either. I enjoyed it so much. I have to admit, it gave me a taste for Lurlene McDaniel's books later as well as other tragic stories.

It inspired me to start writing myself. I really saw the possibilities of good writing. Yes, I was also reading the the Little House books, Heidi, Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume, but it was this one that made me think that I could write! Shortly after finishing this book, I attempted to write my first 'novel'. It was five written pages long, and really bad, but I was proud of it then. I hid it away in my desk and didn't let anyone else read it. It was my secret. I was proud that I wrote it, but not confident enough to let anyone else see it. It was delicious to have my secret story hidden away.

Since I have focused on books with autoimmune diseases these past two posts, I think the next post will be about Betty Ren Wright's The Dollhouse Murders. Yes, I think a nice ghost/murder story would be good change of topic.