After Ever After by Jordan Sonnenblick

The book that I recommend all of you should read is After Ever After by Jordan Sonnenblick. It has not won any awards even though it should and the recommended reading age is 12 years old and up. It is the sequel to Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie. It is about Jeffery, a teen in remission, and his friend Tad, another teen in remission and their life. Jeffery and Tad are a little different because of the fact that they both had cancer. Some people don’t realize what they’ve been through and why they do things certain ways. Tad doesn’t have strong enough legs to walk, so he is in a wheelchair and Jeffery’s brain doesn’t work the best. They make a promise to each other. Tad promises he will walk at graduation and Jeffery promises to study hard enough to pass the test all 8th graders must pass. There are lots of ups and downs throughout the process of achieving each of their goal, but something major changes everything. You will have to read to see if your everyday problems can even compare to what happens with Tad and Jeffery.
This book has sad parts, but it’s hilarious. One of the funniest part is when the gym teacher gives the kids a lecture about why fitness is important. He says, “We were all born with two things: a body, and a brain. The problem is that you all sit in school all day on your big, old, cushy hineys working on the brain part. Then you go home and what do you do? You sit around some more. And let me tell you, when I was a kid, we didn’t have any of the Nitendo, Sega Genesis, Wii, three-D GameCube stuff. Our three-D game platform was called a park. Our Nitendo virtual reality war game was called hide-and-seek. And Wii was the sound we made when we jumped fifteen feet from a tire swing.” Jordan Sonneblick has also wrote other books including: Notes from the Midnight Driver and Zen and the Art of Faking it.

Kirkis reviews says, “In this companion novel to Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie (2005), Steven’s little brother Jeffrey, now in eighth grade and in full remission from leukemia, discovers that happily ever after isn’t quite what he expected. First of all, his hero big brother abandons him to take a year off from college to play drums in Africa. Then he finds out that to get into high school, he’ll have to pass a statewide standardized test in math, his worst subject. Finally, he is stricken by the news that his best friend Tad, also a cancer survivor, is back in treatment. The only bright spot is that cute new girl Lindsey is showing an interest in him. Now if he could just figure out how to talk to her! Told with Sonnenblick’s trademark self-deprecating humor, this stand-alone tween narrative slots neatly into the space between the author’s YA and J titles, sensitively dealing with issues of family, friendship and death in a way that will appeal to middle-grade students. Recommended for fans and new readers alike.”

Recommended by Becca Kennedy