Forever Changes | 
 enlarge | Author: Brendan Halpin
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 341193
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Reading Level: Young Adult
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.7 x 0.9
ISBN: 0374324360
EAN: 9780374324360
ASIN: 0374324360
Publication Date: September 2, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: Brand New Book, Ships Immediately
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Product Description
5:30 a.m., Brianna Pelletier gets ready for her daily pounding. As she lies on the couch, her dad beats her chest, then her back, coaxing the mucus out of her lungs. The pounding doesn’t take care of everything. Brianna’s held out for a long time, but a body with cystic fibrosis doesn’t last forever. It doesn’t matter that Brianna has a brilliant mathematical mind or that she’s a shoo-in for MIT. Or even that her two best friends are beautiful, popular, and loyal. In the grand scheme of things, none of that stuff matters at all. The standard life, lasting maybe seventy-five years, is no more than a speck in the sum total of the universe. At eighteen, and doubting she’ll make nineteen, Brianna is practically a nonentity. Of course she’s done the math. But in her senior year of high school, Brianna learns of another kind of math, in which an infinitely small, near-zero quantity can have profound effects on an entire system. If these tiny quantities didn’t exist, things wouldn’t make the same sense. Funny, tear-jerking, and memorable, the author’s second novel for teens introduces readers to an extraordinary girl who learns that the meaning of forever can change, and that life – and death – is filled with infinite possibilities.
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Courtesy of Teens Read Too October 31, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Brianna Pelletier was born with a death sentence. Her DNA gave her Cystic Fibrosis. The only unknown for Brianna is how long she will have.
It's Brianna's senior year and while her friends are planning for college, Brianna's plans are far simpler: live to see graduation. She never intended to go to college. She never believed she'd survive this long. But things are going pretty good. She's managed to avoid any serious infections and remain out of the hospital. She fears that if she needs to return to the hospital, she'll never leave. Well, she'd never leave alive.
So as senior year progress, she gains insight into what it means to really live, by an unlikely source - her ailing math teacher. Her alphabetically placed study buddy, Adam, hears a rumor that Mr. Eccles was in a band, Love, in the past. Downloading the music, Adam shares the bizarre album, Forever Changes, with Brianna. The music reaches a part of her that she could never put into words. After hearing the music, and then encountering Mr. Eccles one evening on a deserted beach, the two form an understanding with each other.
Through Brianna's dad's gentle love, the nerdy pressure from Adam, and the desire to live courtesy of Mr. Eccles, Brianna takes living to the next step - she attends an information session at MIT and takes the scariest step of her life, sending in her application. This action could bring hope or despair. On one level, she fears that by sending it in, she is hexing herself that she will never live to see her admission to MIT. But on another level, she doesn't want to die and wants some ray of hope, something to live for.
In Brianna, Mr. Halpin shares with readers both a wish to live and a desire to not die, which really are not one and the same. Brianna does her best with the hand she's been dealt. More than anything, she dreams of being like everyone else without a care in the world, but she has greater obstacles to overcome. She does so bravely and without blame. She's an inspiring character to curl up and share a few hours with.
Reviewed by: Jaglvr
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