Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush

I always struggle a little bit to review YA becuase it's just a type of literature I don't really understand. I didn't read much YA when I was a kid, and I rarely read it now. I picked up this book because I did have memories of reading The House of Dies Drear as a kid and I really liked it. I think overall, Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush was a pretty good book. I have no idea what an actual young person would think of it. The main character is a teenager who, while not outrighth abandoned by her mother, is largely left on her own to not only put herself through high school, but to also care for her older brother who evidently has some kind of undiagnosed developmental disability. I found the main character, Tree, to be admirable and (given the circumstnaces set up in this book) plausible.

I found the ghost story part a little weird. The ghost materializes through the center of a table - I think this was maybe supposed to be funny, but I'm not sure. His ability to send the main character back in time was interesting, but the resulting flashbacks were sommetimes so clunky, they actually became compelling. The flashbacks seems to present, and then resolve, multiple mysteries. The mysteries are an odd jumble, alternately presenting information t In fact, the seeming randomness actually made the story more interesting because I wanted to find out waht the heck was going on with this story. However, inthinking about the story as a whole, I feel like the supernatural elements are more successful if you think about them more interms of another mechanism to further explore the dynamic of Tree's relationship with her mother.

Sometimes when I read YA novels, I find the interactions between the teen protagnoist and their parents to be contrived (the parents are either ridiculously dense, or the kid is ridiculously bratty), but i thought the relationship between the main character of Sweet Whispers and her mother to be refreshingly nuanced. Her mother is complicated, largely due to the mother's decisons. However, I liked that the book left it somewhat ambiguous as to whether alll of the mother's decisions were bad ones (some definitely were bad decisions - but some may have come of necessity.) And as the story unfolds,Tree and the reader gets a better understanidng of her behavior. The story doesn't try to excuse or justify the mother's more questionable behavior, just gives more context. Tree (and the reader) are still allowed to be angry or distrustful of the mother.

I guess I'd recommend this book to a YA reader who liked ghosts, but didn't like things that are scary (and a YA reader who is emotionally ready to read about the deaths of close family members.)