Yesterday evening, I finished reading Red, White, and Whole by Rajani LaRocca. This historical novel-in-verse is about Reha, a thirteen-year-old Indian American girl who feels torn between her life at school and her life at home in 1983. Although she loves her family and spending time with her family's Indian friends on the weekends, sometimes she just wants to be like other girls at her school, wearing trendy clothes, listening to pop music, and going to school dances. Soon after her parents allow her to go to the fall school dance, she finds out that her mother, or Amma, is sick with leukemia. Over the next few months, she tries be the daughter her parents want her to be in order to save Amma's life because she doesn't know how to go on without her.
Reading this novel-in-verse was absolutely devastating and it really pulled at my heartstrings throughout. I definitely found Reha very relatable because she was at an age where she wanted to fit in with her friends, but at the same time she didn't want to disappoint her parents. Her life became even more difficult to balance when Amma was diagnosed with leukemia and she withdrew from her friends at school because she thought it would help if she focused all her attention on family and schoolwork. It's a little misguided, but I understood why Reha felt that way after her dad convinced her mom it would be okay for Reha to go to the school dance despite her reservations. I don't want spoil too much of the story, but there was a moment towards the end of Amma's treatment when I felt a great deal of hope before being crushed. Red, White, and Whole is a tearjerker, so I recommend it to those who enjoy sad stories or have faced loss in their lives and want a relatable story.
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