True Confessions of a Heartless Girl

As I read this book in one sitting, I couldn't help think that this seemed to be more of an adult book than any of Martha Brooks other novels. Perhaps it was the many adults that surrounded the main character. In most young adult books the teenaged main character is surrounded by her peers, but in this book, it is mostly adults who help her to reveal her pain and to make a new life. Rather than be on the sidelines, the adults are front and center and we learn about their own sometimes unhappy lives.This is a good book for teenagers and their parents to share. A quick read with substance. Try Martha Brooks' other books as well.

Even when Noreen Stall has the best intentions, it seems that she screws everything up. And when she makes so many mistakes that she starts to hate herself, she runs from the people who love her. When she runs away from her boyfriend, taking his truck, money and unborn baby, she finds herself in the small town of Pembina Lake. There she lands in the rundown café owned by Lynda Bradley, a single mother of a three-year-old boy, Seth. Lynda is struggling to make sense of a life that could have been so much more. She lets Noreen stay the night and, in doing so, unleashes a series of events that force the people in the town to take a look at their own lives. When Dolores Harper, who has a gift for helping people, hears about Noreen, she decides to get her to talk. But while she is helping Noreen open up, she can't see that her "oldest friend in the world" might need her support as well. During her stay at Pembina Lake, Noreen makes many more mistakes, including accidentally poisoning Seth's beloved dog and ripping out part of the wall in the café while trying to remove the fading, ugly wallpaper. Will she run again, or decide to stay? The characters you meet in this book are real and unforgettable. Watching them help each other along gave me a satisfying feeling. --- Reviewed by Briana Orr

Here is the quote that begins "True Confessions of a Heartless Girl":"The American novelist John Gardner, I think it was, said there are, really, only two plot lines: a stranger rides into town, and a stranger rides out of town", - William Least Heat-Moon "PrairyErth".This book begins with the former. In it, seventeen-year-old Noreen Stall has arrived at the M.T. Café in a stolen truck, her pockets full of stolen money, and a baby growing in her womb. She has arrived in a small Canadian town in the middle of nowhere without direction or hope. Winner of the 2002 Governor General's Literary Award (think of it as the Canadian Newbery), this book is one of the most quietly moving pieces of young adult literature I have ever read.Author Martha Brooks has created a small stirring story. Individual characters meet and mix with Noreen, showing their own private sorrows and disappointments in life. The girl herself seems to attract nothing but bad luck and trouble, and it's difficult to see how exactly she's going to change her life around. This is not a story where everything slowly gets better and better for Noreen until, at the end, she's bursting with enough joy and happiness to fill her days. It's subtler than that. More realistic. And filled with beautiful well-thought out characters. Following in a long line of stories in which a single girl finds herself surrounded by occasionally understanding people, this book is nothing so much as an older version of "The Great Gilly Hopkins".Moralistic parents beware. This story does contain a fair amount of swearing (though I was amused by the Canadian/British bad word "bugger" showing up as well) in addition to discussions of abortion and miscarriages. And I don't know how interesting this book is to kids and teens. After all, much of this story concentrates on the thoughts and emotions of the middle-aged and elderly. Not typical YA fare. But for any teen that is looking for a book that shows real problems without becoming didactic, preachy, or condescending, this story is ideal. There are no easy answers. Noreen isn't going to be saved by the kindness of strangers. This book deals with the truth and its ending is satisfactory in the extreme.

Noreen, who is seventeen and newly-pregnant, is a human demolition derby who has stolen her latest boyfriend's money and truck. Running away from her latest disaster, she finds herself in the small prairie town of Pembina Lake. There she becomes the catalyst for change among all the story's other impeccably drawn characters, ranging from five year-old Seth to septuagenarian Dolores. The old café in town where newly-arrived Noreen takes shelter from the storm is symbolic of the characters in Pembina Lake--they too are going to rot away and collapse if this obnoxious teenager doesn't tear at their edges as she does with the café wallpaper. This is a remarkable story with just a couple of settings, amazing dialogue, and portraits of a small town that frequently made me shiver the way I did when first reading Steinbeck's 1930's descriptions of Salinas.

But I shouldn't have been. Martha Brooks is a wonderful author, and this book lives up to the high standard set by BONE DANCE. I often have trouble sympathizing with characters like Noreen, who I sometimes find annoying. But this story drew me in completely and made me care about what happened to everyone. The characters of the elderly women were excellent additions to - it's not every day you find perspective like that in a YA novel. I like bittersweet endings.