CURES FOR HEARTBREAK
Margo Rabb
Delacorte Press
Fiction
ISBN-10: 0385734026
ISBN-13: 9780385734028
256 pages

• Read an Excerpt

No matter what issue you might be reading about in a YA book --- pregnancy, drugs, depression --- the one point that comes up time and again is this: there are no easy answers. Ever. There are viewpoints, there are arguments, but few come without hard-earned discussion and none can ever hold the final word. To put it plainly, life is never that simple. And, arguably, the most complex of these issues, a concept that is no stranger to the genre, is the most debatable in terms of how one addresses it: death. Even with the seeming inability to construct a definitive, proactive response to death, writers continue to offer meditations on how it can be approached. Some even come very, very close to what one can only suspect is the truth.

In CURES FOR HEARTBREAK, Margo Rabb introduces us to 15-year-old Mia Perlman, whose mother dies 12 days after being diagnosed with melanoma. In her efforts to cope with the aftermath and learn new ways to relate to her older sister, Alex, and her father, Mia begins to reconstruct her own life through a review of her mother's past and a careful study of Mia's present life. In dealing with her grief, Mia confronts fears of her own mortality, the shifting paradigm of life with just her father, and her own forays into love (all with mixed results).

What makes Mia's heartbreak hit home is the skill with which Rabb paints a complete portrait of bereavement. Where some books rely on presenting a protagonist who dwells on the loss of someone wholly wonderful, Rabb chooses to explore the more complex path to healing, one not drenched in sappy sentimentality but rather an assault of all knowledge of the person who is lost. We see not only Mia's sadness at losing a confidant and nurturer but also her less happy memories of her mother: an unconfirmed marital indiscretion, suspected hypochondria, surliness and melancholy. 

More importantly, Rabb concentrates not on the brooding and self-pity that can often permeate this type of novel but on an examination of death's antithesis --- love --- as it touches the lives of her father, her mother and even Mia herself. As a result, each chapter collides and colludes to offer both the familiar and the uncharted with humorous and touching detail, breaking and mending the reader's heart in turns.

CURES FOR HEARTBREAK tells it like it is --- there is no comprehensive, sure way out of loss. There is only a drive to comprehend how that loss fits into our lives --- past, present and future --- and our efforts (experimental, at best) to accommodate these new rules into who we are. And as bleak as that can often seem, Rabb assures us with the authority of someone who's been there that as hopeless as the endeavor can feel, a "cure" can present itself in the most unexpected but wonderful way.

   --- Reviewed by Brian Farrey (emohawk9000@gmail.com

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