SuitabookShining On
Lois Lowry
- Reading
- Consider reading one story at a time, pausing after emotionally heavier pieces. Let your child choose whether to discuss personal connections, and return later to compare how different narrators respond.
- Themes
- Growing through difficulty: The eleven stories place teenagers in varied challenges and describe them learning, growing or finding a way forward. The collection presents perseverance and personal development as recurring possibilities, though each story handles its challenge differently.
- Identity and self-definition: Characters consider dating, coming out, creating a distinctive appearance, comparing themselves with a sibling and living with facial scarring. The range of situations treats self-understanding and individual identity as significant parts of adolescence, without establishing one uniform solution.
- Family relationships and secrets: The stories include parental absence or infidelity, household tensions, a grandmother’s unexpected past, a sibling’s death and a child’s serious illness. The book’s stance on this remains unclear.
- Worth knowing
- The emotional range is broad: alongside dating and family secrets are coming out, bereavement, a dying child, blindness, facial scarring after an accident or bomb, and ghostly children seeking a living girl.