- Winner, Texas Teddy Book Award
- Booklist Best Books of 2007
- Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2007
- Association of Jewish Libraries Notable Book
- A New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age
- Spring 2007 Booksense Pick
- TAYSHAS High School Reading List Selection
- Capitol Choices Selection
- Starred Review, Booklist
- Starred Review, School Library Journal
- Starred Review, The Bulletin
- Starred Review, KLIATT
- First Prize, Atlantic Monthly Fiction Contest
- First Prize, Zoetrope Short Story Contest
- First Prize, American Fiction Contest
- Best New American Voices 2000
- Everybody, regardless of age, should read
this novel - witty, warm, and gorgeous in its fearlessness.
-- The Philadelphia Inquirer, 3/18/07 - “I was ashamed of
my family for having such bad luck.” When Mia is 16, her mother
dies (12 days after being diagnosed with cancer), and her father
has a heart attack. Each beautifully written chapter of Mia’s
story stands alone (versions of many chapters were previously
published in magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly and Seventeen).
Writing in Mia’s voice, Rabb leavens impossible heartbreak with
surprising humor, delivered with a comedian’s timing and dark
absurdity. Rabb is an exceptionally gifted writer who draws subtle
connections between abstract history and intimate lives, particularly
in scenes contrasting the dry school coverage of the Holocaust
with Mia’s Jewish family’s personal history—“the kind of history
that seeps in slowly and colors everything, like a quiet, daily
kind of war.” In Mia, Rabb creates a remarkable character whose
ordinary teen experiences—crushes, friendships, sexual fumblings,
mortification over her family’s behavior—seem all the more authentic
set within the larger tragedies. With almost unbearable poignancy,
Mia talks about how to grow up, survive loss and family history,
and heal her heart: “If grief had a permanence, then didn’t also
love?” Readers will cherish this powerful debut.
-- Booklist (Starred Review) - Black humor, pitch-perfect
detail, and compelling characters make this a terrific read, despite
the pain that permeates every superbly written page. Ninth-grader
Mia has just lost her mother to cancer, and now her father is
hospitalized with heart trouble. The story follows her first through
bleak days at the hospital, then as she copes with her grief for
her mother, her father's new girlfriend, and her sometimes disastrous
attempts to find love. Interwoven throughout the book are Mia's
musings over her family's history and the continuing tragic impact
of the Holocaust. The novel's vivid New York City setting is almost
another character, with vibrant descriptions of subway rides,
shopping trips, and local color. Mia's early experience with loss
influences everything about her life, from her bond with her father
and older sister to her troubles with school and relationships.
As she struggles to make sense of her mother's death and her father's
illness, she also sees humor in everyday situations, and her irreverent
commentary brings the story to life. Mia's romance with Sasha,
a young man whose leukemia is in remission, is especially moving.
A touching afterword reveals just how closely the novel follows
the author's actual experiences.
-- School Library Journal (Starred Review) - When her mother dies unexpectedly, a teen
seeks and eventually finds cures for her broken heart. Twelve
days after her cancer diagnosis, Mia Pearlman's mother dies, leaving
Mia, her older sister Alex and their father bereft. During the
funeral, 15-year-old Mia keeps thinking, "this could not be happening"
and, in the following weeks, her life assumes a surreal quality.
Mia starts dressing in her mother's clothing, burns a memorial
candle in her bedroom, devours books about orphans and chronically
sleeps late, missing classes. Then, just three months later, Mia's
father suffers his second heart attack and undergoes bypass surgery
while Mia and Alex face the possibility of life on their own.
As the Pearlmans slog through their grief, Mia muses about her
mother's first love, is amazed when her father suddenly becomes
engaged to another hospital patient and wonders if she will ever
fall in love. Told in the first person with humor and tears, Mia's
voice is authentic, and her story of family tragedy and healing
rings true. Touching and tender.
-- Kirkus Reviews - Anyone who has grieved the loss of a loved
one will feel an immediate connection to Mia, the narrator of
this intimate novel. Mia is a freshman at the Bronx High School
of Science when her mother dies 12 days after being diagnosed
with cancer. During the next several months, life falls back into
a routine, but everything that Mia experiences—meeting new people,
watching her father fall in love again, and discovering the difference
between infatuation and love—is accompanied by a sense of longing.
Haunted by memories of her mother, Mia is feeling particularly
vulnerable when tragedy strikes a second time, as her father suffers
a heart attack. His subsequent bypass surgery goes well; nonetheless,
Mia remains painfully aware of the consequences of mortality.
Not until she befriends a cancer survivor does she begin to trust
in life again. Despite its title, this novel does not offer a
"cure" for Mia's heartbreak. Rather, it gives readers a keenly
insightful study of grief. Rabb balances sorrow with humor, and
sprinkles quotes by renowned writers on the subjects of love and
loss as additional food for thought. The author, who like Mia
lost her mother as a young adult, writes with authority and precision.
-- Publishers Weekly - Twelve days after Mia Pearlman's mother is
diagnosed with melanoma, she is dead, and for her--at the onset
of teenage years and all the changes this evokes--begins the long,
painful, utterly numbing process of healing a broken heart. Mia's
character is spot on, and her emotions as she works through the
various stages of grief and readjusting to the unexpected life-altering
event of losing her mother are raw and honest. Other characters,
especially Sylvia, her father's new love interest, are well fleshed
out. Though poignant, humor carries this novel, preventing it
from being maudlin. Reminiscent of Mexican milagros, those small
religious charms nailed on sacred objects to denote miracles,
it is through a series of seemingly small experiences that a shattered
heart is miraculously mended.
-- Ingram Library Services - "What no one ever tells you is that
people don't die all at once, but again and again in waves, before
their deaths and after." New York City teenager Mia's mother
goes into the hospital with a stomachache and dies just twelve
days later, after being diagnosed with melanoma. In a wry, introspective
first-person narrative (sections of which were previously published
as short stories), Mia examines the ripple effects of this tragedy,
showing how grief and loss infiltrate her life. She's still getting
used to her odd new familial configuration, wishing the grief
section in Barnes & Noble carried titles such as "How
to Cope When You're Left Alone with Your Father and Sister, Who
Drive You Nuts," when her father has a heart attack and undergoes
triple bypass surgery. Inspired by Rabb's own experiences, her
novel is an artful mix of the poignant and the sometimes comically
mundane. For instance, during her vigil by her father's hospital
bed, Mia hopes that "cancer guy," the nineteen-year-old
leukemia patient in the next bed who is "kind of cute...despite
the baldness and pale skin," doesn't notice she's reading
a trashy romance novel. Her parents are the children of Holocaust
survivors, and Mia reflects back on their lives and on their often
tumultuous marriage with a heightened sense of the fragility of
it all. Still, she manages to cultivate the hope that, "if
grief has a permanence," then love does as well.
-- The Horn Book - This is undeniably
a book of anguish, it's also one of raw strength and casual, clever
humor in random and surprising places, making it a compelling
as well as tearful read.
-- The Bulletin (Starred Review) - This novel is based
on the author's own experience when her mother died after a nine-day
illness. The protagonist here is Mia, 15 years old and stunned
by her mother's death. Mia's mother had gone into the hospital
with a stomachache and emerged 12 days later in a coffin, a victim
of cancer. Mia cannot quite take it in and doesn't know how to
act. Equally stunned and equally confused are her father and older
sister Alex, and the three are somewhat at odds about how they
should carry on and absorb this shattering event into the context
of their lives. Mia finds her grief both embarrassing and overwhelming.
She doesn't know whether to date or stay home. She doesn't know
how to behave around her friends at school. She doesn't know how
to treat her father. She does know her mother and father's relationship
was not perfect and that her mother was an imperfect woman, and
yet no one can speak the truth of the past to each other. Eventually,
Mia's father becomes engaged to a woman wildly different from
her mother and Mia must cope with the reality of the new relationship.
That she does so realistically and complexly is a testament to
the author's experience in dealing with the same issue and the
many unexpected feelings that come into play. The language and
voice are compelling. Relevant and thoughtful quotations head
every chapter. The characters are fully formed and when the last
page turns, four new and fascinating people have been born into
the reader's consciousness.
-- KLIATT (Starred Review) - Mia Pearlman's mother enters the hospital
complaining of a stomachache, and twelve days later, she dies
of melanoma. Her death leads Mia on a journey of memories, disastrous
dates, and ice cream, which is interrupted when her father suffers
a heart attack. Alex, Mia's gifted, sometimes antagonistic sister,
leaves for college four months later, leaving Mia and her father
alone to embark on both physical and emotional recoveries. Although
the Pearlmans are not devoutly religious, their Jewish traditions
play a strong part in their reactions to events that unfold from
medical traumas, both theirs and those of the people they meet
in the hospital. Throughout the book, Mia has positive encounters
that stem from sad events, including making a new, close friend
and taking her first hike with a sensitive, intelligent cancer
survivor. This book could easily have been overwhelming given
the mother's death, Mia's recurring company of terminally ill
people, and her failed romances. Instead Rabb produces a witty,
matter-of-fact, and heartfelt look at what grief means to one
teenager, and how the relationships and habits Mia acquires help
her to accept change. The light, everyday comedy born of a series
of disasters prevents the book from becoming maudlin. Peripheral
characters are delightfully, even frighteningly, real in their
details. The Pearlman family, although always just this side of
dysfunctional, is loving and supportive in their own way. Teens
looking for a tearjerker, a romance, or an unexpected comedy will
find much to enjoy here.
-- VOYA - Margo Rabb’s extraordinary new novel,
Cures for Heartbreak, would be notable simply for the out-and-out
raves from Joyce Carol Oates and Michael Chabon gracing the cover.
But what’s most astonishing about the book is Rabb’s
multi-layered and eloquent exploration of what it means to lose
the ones we love.
In the novel, Rabb channels the breaking heart of fifteen-year-old Mia Pearlman, whose mother dies twelve days after a cancer diagnosis, a trauma soon followed by her father’s heart attack. As Mia navigates her altered world, she realizes that there are no cures for heartbreak, that a death is not something you get over, but that there can still be courage, hope and love. Based on Rabb’s experience of losing her own parents, this novel gets at the blinding ache of grief, while also managing to be very funny, very smart, and addictively readable. Rabb also includes a wallop of an afterward in the book, where she writes honestly and movingly about the deaths of her parents and her struggles to make sense of the tragedy. To paraphrase Rabb, if grief has a permanence, well then, so does love. This is truly a gorgeous and important book, one I’ve been pressing onto friends and their teenaged kids.
-- Cookie Magazine
- 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.
-- Teenreads.com - Intense, poignant but also very funny, Mia’s
story of the year following her mother’s death explores
the nature of grief as it is experienced by a Jewish teenager,
her older sister, and her father. There is much pain in the story
but also much wisdom, not to mention a smart look at school, friendship,
and romance. Mia’s thoughts, her struggle to understand,
her search for human connections, her reactions to death and illness
are as profoundly touching as they are irreverent, profane, sarcastic,
and flippant. She experiences no Jewish insights, no epiphanies,
and is not edified by suffering, unlike so many characters who
confront death in teenage novels. She suffers, she acts out, she
behaves badly, but she survives with the help of the superbly
drawn characters of her father and sister, a girlfriend with whom
she ponders the mysteries of sex, and a boy whom she comes to
care for. Mia’s voice is totally engrossing, the dialogue
sparkles, all of the characters, including a few oddballs, are
convincing, and the plot and theme are developed with consummate
writerly skill. Rabb is the author of four fun mysteries about
two runaway sisters who live, using false identities, in a small
town in Indiana , but there is no comparison between those earlier,
lighter-hearted stories and this more serious, more masterful
work.
-- Association of Jewish Libraries - Mia is a Jewish teenager -- relevant because
of several religious and cultural references and comments about
the Holocaust in the novel. Her mom dies 12 days after a cancer
diagnosis. Mia's full of conflicting emotions that are expressed
in sometimes humorous ways. She wonders whether it's OK to date
shortly after her mom dies; is it OK to wear her mom's clothes;
return to school -- and how to feel normal when nothing feels
normal anymore. It's an experience that will also help people
understand grieving and know there is recovery.
-- Detroit Free Press - A powerful debut with unforgettable characters and important things
to tell us about family, history, death, love, and philosophy. It’s a
story that will heal your own heart.
-- jbooks.com - If you go to Amazon and limit your search
to children’s books and type in cancer, you’ll get
more than 4000 book titles. And the search results don’t
include many of the mid-grade and YA novels where cancer is part
of the central conflict in the story.
With the field so packed with already published books (many of which I’ve read), I thought it would be unlikely for a new book on the subject to be a MUST READ, but that was before I entered a contest on a literary blog and won a copy of a new book. And now I’m recommending this with all my heart, for teens and adults. Just get the box of tissues handy.
CURES FOR HEARTBREAK... opens with a man and his two daughters picking out the coffin for the wife/mother who just died from cancer. The scene is surreal, with an odd undertaker with a stage-like name and cheery disposition, the husband/father mumbling through the numbness of grief that his wife just had a stomach ache, went to the hospital, was diagnosed with cancer, and died twelve days, and the two girls, Alex and Mia, bickering over everything. The pain they are feeling from the loss of their loved one is palpable. So is the need for a bit of lightness, a moment of humor, a real smile, all of which also come with the package.
The story belongs to Mia’s, her perspective, her needs and desires driving the action. She flirts and shops and complains, an adolescent force compelling her to move through her life despite the death of her mother. But at times, everything is dampened with the black oppression of loss and fear. In class, she cannot sift through her mundane world history text, with everything neatly color-coded and sorted into crisp, discrete chapters. At home, she fights with her sister, but misses her when she heads off to college. Fear about her father’s health overtakes her when he has a heart attack, but she balks at attending a health spa retreat with him. She paws through her memories of her mother, searching for clues about who she really was, wearing her mother’s clothes to keep her close, yet feeling her mother slip further away as the days go by.
The author, Margo Rabb, writes with clear simplicity, choice details and confidence, so the reader knows from the first moment, that these are characters to care about, these are our family and loved ones who have battled cancer and lost, these are our sisters pushing the envelope of pain and grief, this is our surviving parent who is vulnerable and might die soon, too. CURES FOR HEARTBREAK is sassy and irreverent, sore and emotional, a moment and a lifetime.
-- Marianas Variety - "Cures for Heartbreak is a sad, funny, smart,
endlessly poignant novel. Reading it made me feel grateful for
my life, for my family, and above all for the world that brings
us gifts like the gift of Margo Rabb."
-- Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - "Margo Rabb's story beautifully brings together
the intensely personal and the historical, and rings with the
authenticity of a bitter, yet illuminating truth."
-- Joyce Carol Oates - "Cures for Heartbreak is full of sadness,
humor, and quirky details that ring completely true. I thoroughly
enjoyed it."
-- Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Prep and The Man of My Dreams
REVIEWS
