Reviews for True to Form: A Novel

The average rating for True to Form: A Novel based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-01-07 00:00:00 Elvin Parson If you're looking for something a little fluffy but well written, not shallow or sappy, I recommend True to Form. The book was written and marketed for adults, but I wish I could have read it when I was thirteen or fourteen. Maybe it would have helped me understand that all girls make similar mistakes and have similar "aha" moments at that age. Maybe I wouldn't have felt so alone in my dilemmas and awkwardness. What made this book work for me was that I really liked Katie Nash. She's a very precocious 13 1/2 years old. She wants to be a poet. She loves to write and store away observations about her world. A lot of her observations are laugh-out-loud funny, and others get you right down there where it murmurs. Katie's mother died a couple of years ago, so she's had to grow up faster than other girls. The loss has made her more thoughtful and more aware of pain in other people. Katie takes us through the summer of 1961 in Missouri. She navigates treacherous social waters, learns about true love from an elderly couple, and painfully discovers what real friendship means. I'm usually prone to cynical scoffing at books of this nature. However, Elizabeth Berg's rendition of Katie's voice is so...well, "true to form." It brought back a lot of memories of my own adolescent struggles and awakenings. I love the way Katie takes note of every detail of the good moments in her life. She stores these moments in her internal "scrapbook" so she can pull them out and look at them when things aren't going well. I did exactly the same thing when I was her age. I used to tell myself to pay close attention, because when I got older I was going to wish I could have these moments back. I don't know how I knew that, I just did. All these years later, those amazing moments still pop into my mind when I least expect them. "Whoa! Where did that come from?" My mental scrapbook. Far out!

Review # 2 was written on 2008-05-20 00:00:00 Tom Doherty I gave this a very rare five-stars. This book encompasses one of the sweetest stories I have read in my life. It is an extremely small book (a little over 200 pages) and I savored every page. It is written like poetry and the author really knows what it is like to be that little girl on the verge of becoming a woman. It details what is like to want to "fit" in - in such a way that all of us with those inner little girls, can forgive ourselves for the manners in which we behave. I found myself in Katie, the main character - in both the good and the bad. I came away from this book with a true smile on my face and a tear in my eye to say "goodbye."