A Month of Mondays

by Joëlle Anthony

Overview

This can’t be good! Suddenly Suze’s mom wants back into her life, and her teacher wants her to “try harder”?! As if middle school wasn’t hard enough, Suze Tamaki's life gets turned upside down when her mother reappears after a ten-year absence. Once Suze gets over her shock, she thinks it might be cool to get to know her mom. But her older sister Tracie is determined not to let her back into their lives. At school things aren’t much better. One of her teachers decides the way to cure Suze’s lack of motivation is to move her into Honors English – a development Suze finds both inspiring and distressing. When she's paired with straight-A student Amanda on an English assignment, she finds herself caring about people’s expectations like she’s never done before.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781772600278
Publisher:	Second Story Press
Publication date:	03/07/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	344
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	9 - 12 Years

About the Author

Joëlle Anthony is a playwright, actress, writing teacher, and author of three novels for teens, Restoring Harmony, The Right&the Real and Speed of Life, published under the pen name J. M. Kelly. She enjoys teaching workshops to writers of all ages, and has been the Writer in Residence at Gabriola Elementary School for six years in British Columbia, where she lives.

What People are Saying About This

author of the Ever After High School stories Suzanne Selfors

As real as it is heartfelt. When 13-year-old Suze hears her mother's voice for the first time in ten years, she's torn between an oath she made to her sister and overwhelming curiosity. A Month of Mondays is a tender story of a girl's desire to heal her family.

Editorial Reviews

Readers will discover that Suze Tamaki is a courageous and admirable heroine who gives them insight into what it is really like to be in middle school.

Resource Links

Suze Tamaki is a Grade 7 slacker whose wry observations about the world around her make her both loveable and relatable.

Quill & Quire

Joëlle Anthony’s has written a complex and heartwarming story that focuses on the impact of parental abandonment, complicated family relationships and healing. There is a great cast of quirky characters, who are believable and well-crafted.

Children's Books Heal

A Month of Mondays is an intensely readable novel. It is full of fun, bright and natural dialogue. It has a lovable underdog narrator, someone to whom many readers will relate. Highly Recommended.

CM: Canadian Review of Materials

[Joëlle Anthony] has created an engaging narrator bound to resonate with readers. Suze is half Anglo, half Japanese, and a Canadian tween through and through. Her missteps, hesitations, and assumptions are universal, and when she faces her toughest challenges, she takes messy but brave leaps that leave her a little more mature than the day before.

Booklist

Suze is believable, funny and appealing. Early teen readers (9-12) will identify with the misdemeanours that keep her a frequent visitor to the principal’s office and with her efforts to understand a mother she hasn’t seen since she was two.

Winnipeg Free Press

It’s nice to see a kid who neither has it all together or sits at the bottom of the heap... Suze is probably more like most kids, at neither extreme but somewhere in the middle, just trying to make sense of the people and circumstances of her life. She may not always choose well–her recurrent trips to the principal’s office attest to that–and may get distracted and discouraged but she keeps on plugging away.... And Joëlle Anthony ensures the reader comes away with a lesson in stick-with-it-ness, demonstrating that things always resolve themselves somehow, sometimes more and sometimes less positively than you might imagine.

CanLit for Little Canadians