Saturday, November 05, 2005

My Brother Made Me Do It, by Peg Kehret

Julie Welsh gets an assignment to write to an elderly pen pal in a nursing home. We never see any of the replies she gets, but we get plenty of news about Julie, her nine year-old brother who's always getting her in trouble and has an obsessive fascination with memorization, and Julie's struggle with rheumatoid arthritis.

I suppose I was hoping for a book that would really help readers understand rheumatoid arthritis, but we never quite get that. Instead, the story is a bit broken up, as one would expect from a storyline driven by letters. I'm just not sure that it works in this case. A weak book on an important topic.

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