Rainbow Reviews

BOOK BLURB:
Jesse Bennett, the 13-year-old heroine of Beale's charming debut, longs to escape the humdrum life of Britain's East Yorkshire. Stuck in a small town with her unstable mother and ineffectual father, Jesse wants to see the world, but her hopes of breaking free are dashed when her mother attempts suicide and her father, reasoning that a change of scene will help his wife recover, moves the family farther into the country. But the people of rural Midham are less than welcoming to the strange new arrivals. Eventually, Jesse falls in with Tracey and Amanda, the toughest and most feared girls in town, though with this security comes increased scrutiny: Jesse must pretend to be just like her mates, and even though she cares nothing for clothes or boys and despises the meanness, she develops a crush on Amanda that threatens to end unfavorably. Beale's lively narrative captures, with touching accuracy, the plights of adolescence; if the novel sometimes veers toward the saccharine and relies on less than surprising plot twists, Jesse's affirming arc offers hope in a place where it's in very short supply.

BOOK REVIEW:
Jesse is a young girl growing up near the collapsing and crumbling shore of East Yorkshire, twenty miles from the North Sea. An apt metaphor for the life she leads, in a household of mental disorder, where the constant stress of dealing with a mother who is emotionally ill and a father who alternates between absenting himself emotionally and enabling the mother, Jesse finds herself continuously with no firm ground on which to stand. At school she pretends her mother is the proud winner of a world cruise, rather than suddenly an inmate of a mental institution after a suicide attempt, and when her falsehood is discovered, she is ostracized even more than she had already been.

Moving to a new town might give her a new start, and it does when she first meets some new young people, but as always she still finds herself on shaky ground. Just as she is beginning to discern the outlines of her own personal sexual identity, Jesse “comes out” to a girl who has befriended her, and discovers how strongly she has misread the girl's signals. Then a classmate, called out by a teacher for pejorative slang about Gays, determines to make a victim of the schoolmate considered to be Gay. Jesse is thrust into a situation where she must either make a stand for what she knows to be right, or become an inactive bystander with a serious wrong on her conscience.

"Another Life Altogether" is a very detailed book which examines the various milieus surrounding a young girl on the brink of discovery of her gender identity, and its illustration of her life and background is intense. The reader will find Jesse likable, understandable, and all too realistic, making us realize how very many young persons go through situations, including hate crimes, ugly accusations, and ostracism, every day. The mental illness in her household will not be true for every reader's experience; yet author Elaine Beale delineates it in a way that makes it very understandable, and Jesse's reactions and behavior as a result become very comprehensible as well.

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