Have you ever noticed how the reading of one book influences the reading of another? This week I read two oddly related books: The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown and So B. It by Sarah Weeks.
I resisted reading The DaVinci Code until the very end, but I often spout off about how you can’t see a movie until you’ve read the book so I decided I shouldn’t be a hypocrite. Great puzzles, plot, suspense….I was disappointed with how flat some of the characters were, though. A great book for teens interested in the big questions. Yes it’s controversial, but I think the author should be given credit for letting the reader make up his or her own mind about what is fiction and what is not.
Which brings me to So B. It by Sarah Weeks which is also about a girl trying to solve a mystery about her past. There is a name similarity, too, but that would be giving away too much of the plot. Heidi’s mother is mentally disabled and has a vocabulary of just a couple dozen words. Heidi is raised in part by Bernadette, a neighbor who suffers from agoraphobia which means she is scared to death of leaving the house. As a result, Heidi has grown up with a lot of responsibilities yet she has never gone to school.
When Bernie finds an old camera with an undeveloped roll of pictures, the mysterious photos provide tantalyzing clues to where Heidi’s mother came from, including the sign for a mental institution in Liberty, NY. Like the characters in The Da Vinci Code, Heidi can’t resist the challenge of putting the pieces together and uses her “luck” to come up with the money to make the cross country bus trip; a quest that she hopes will answer the question of who she is and most importantly, what is the meaning of her mother’s mystery word: “Soof.”
