Sunny Side Up - Jennifer & Matthew Holm
1. Sunny Side Up - Sunny Lewin is sent to Florida to stay the summer with her grandfather, shattering her plans for a holiday with her best friend. Everyone in the retirement community is old, her grandfather smokes, and there's little to do; Disney is not in the picture, but trips to the post office are. Soon, though, she meets another kid and they bond over comic books and finding lost cats. Gradually, the reason why Sunny was sent to Florida emerges; her older brother has a substance abuse problem. Sunny keeps her feelings bottled up until one day she can't anymore. This is a very sweet, poignant story, based on the authors' real life experiences. It's light and a very quick read; there aren't any explicit morals or lessons, just a grandfather who turns out to have some of the right answers. A very skilled handling of a sensitive topic. [4]
4. Sunny Makes a Splash - I read this book second. Whoops! Another sweet Sunny story (also autobiographical) in which not much happens and no big lessons are learned. Sunny gets a summer job working the snack stand at a pool. Her grandfather visits as well. Sunny gets a small vicarious taste of romance through the older lifeguards at the pool, while making tentative friends with a nice boy who works at the stand as well, even going on a sort of double date. Oh, and the running theme is that she's scared of the high dive. Sunny is such an innocent, hard-working, responsible girl that it's baffling why throughout the book the mother is portrayed as such an awful, paranoid harridan, freaking out at both Sunny's exceedingly mild first steps toward teenhood and independence and grandfather's own romantic evenings. [4]
