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MOST OF MY friends now go to Pius Senior College, but my mother wouldn't allow it because she says the girls there leave with limited options and she didn't bring me up to have limitations placed upon me. If you know my mother, you'll sense there's an irony there, based on the fact that she is the Queen of the Limitation Placers in my life. Francesca battles her mother, Mia, constantly over what's best for her. All Francesca wants is her old friends and her old school, but instead Mia sends her to St. Sebastian's, an all-boys' school that has just opened its doors to girls. Now Francesca's surrounded by hundreds of boys, with only a few other girls for company. All of them weirdos or worse. Then one day, Mia is too depressed to get out of bed. One day turns into months, and as her family begins to fall apart, Francesca realises that without her mother's high spirits, she hardly knows who she is. But she doesn't yet realise that she's more like Mia than she thinks. With a little unlikely help from St. Sebastian's, she just might be able to save her family, her friends, and especially herself.
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0Review also posted at The Wandering Fangirl.
This is one of those times I'm supremely grateful for the friends I have on Goodreads, because I very nearly passed this over without a second thought until I saw the four and five star ratings people whose recs I trust gave it. On the surface, there doesn't seem to be too much to this book; Francesca is in one of the first girl classes at a formerly all-boys boarding school. Yawn, right?
Saving Francesca turned out to be so much more beautiful and intricate than that.
The boarding school and Francesca's struggles within are the supporting players to the turmoil, the loneliness, the sadness and occasional happiness she finds. I don't suffer from depression and I don't know anyone who has had a breakdown the way Francesca's mother has, but I found I could truly understand what she was going through. I could almost relate, I could sympathize, I was right there with her every step of the way, and it made the normal teenage things -- the crush, the new friends, finding out who she truly is -- feel so much more than the sum of their parts.
And sad as it may be at times, it never drags you down into the depths, but instead shows you enough of a glimpse to understand what it's like.
This is a gorgeous novel, one I would highly recommend to anyone. After reading [b:On the Jellicoe Road|1162022|On the Jellicoe Road|Melina Marchetta|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1212708945s/1162022.jpg|6479100] last month and having finished Saving Francesca, [a:Melina Marchetta|47104|Melina Marchetta|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1277655889p2/47104.jpg] has become one of my favorite YA authors. I'll be reading everything of hers I can get my hands on.
0Good but not Marchetta's best. The story centers on Francesca who not only has to navigate life at a new school which has only recently started admitting female students but who also must deal with her mother's acute depression. As always, Marchetta manages to make her characters feel so real and Francesca reminded me in certain ways of how I was in high school. And the family dynamics were fanastic, the effect of her mother Mia's total withdrawal from life and how it hurt and confused each of them felt so real. I'm not much for stories about high school drama and boys but this was done well enough to keep me interested and I really enjoyed the quirks of the different characters. Worth reading but didn't have quite the emotional pull or complexity of Finnikin or Jellicoe Road.
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