Product Description

WOULD YOU RATHER know what’s going to happen or not know?
A summer night. A Saturday. For Natalie’s amazing older sister, Claire, this summer is fantastic, because she’s zooming off to college in the fall. For Natalie, it’s a fun summer with her friends; nothing special. When Claire is hit by a car, the world changes in a heartbeat. Over the next four days, moment by moment, Natalie, her parents, and their friends wait to learn if Claire will ever recover.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #433932 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-08
• Released on: 2008-07-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 176 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The opening chapters give little hint of the intensity of Jocelyn's (How It Happened in Peach Hill) exquisitely honed novel. Soon-to-be-high school junior Natalie and her friends like to play Would you...—a game exemplified by the book's first lines: Would you rather know what's going to happen? Or not know? Abruptly everything changes: Natalie's older sister, Claire, is struck by a car and rendered comatose. Jocelyn maintains a measured pace as the next few days unfold: Natalie watches her mother numb herself with tranquilizers, her father grow angry and look for someone to blame. Although the plot line sounds like that of a standard weeper, the author resists the urge to magnify emotions. Natalie reacts honestly, neither beautifully nor nobly—she is initially repulsed when a nurse asks her to massage Claire's grossly swollen feet; she lashes out at a boy who already (and needlessly) feels guilty. The light touch with which Jocelyn handles her difficult material is best seen when Claire is declared brain-dead and taken off life support: the humanity in the author's treatment affords the reader a sense both of grief and of peace. Ages 14–up. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Grade 8–11—Natalie and Claire are more than sisters; they're also friends. Only two years apart, they've always shared secrets, clothes, and a bedroom, and Natalie can't imagine what it's going to be like in the fall when Claire goes away to college. Only Claire doesn't go away. At the beginning of the summer, she's struck by a car and suffers massive head trauma. The next time Natalie sees her is at the hospital. There are tubes snaking in and out of her swollen body and there's a crisscrossing of stitches on her shaved head. This is not Claire's story, but Natalie's. It takes place over the course of 12 days of grief and coping, and continuing to live when the unimaginable happens. Natalie, her friends, and her family are well delineated, but as the story is told from Natalie's point of view, hers is the most complete portrayal. Jocelyn captures a teen's thoughts and reactions in a time of incredible anguish without making her overly dramatic. Readers will fly through the pages of this book, crying, laughing, and crying some more.—Heather E. Miller, Homewood Public Library, AL
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Would you rather lose all your hair or all your teeth? Those are the kinds of questions Natalie and her friends ask each other when they sit around their hangout, the Ding-Dong. Would you rather die or have everyone else die? That becomes more than a question when Natalie’s beloved sister, Claire, is hit by a car. In short chapters that are wrenching, honest, even funny at times, Jocelyn takes readers on Natalie’s journey from Before to After. Natalie is coming home from a night out with friends when she gets the phone call. As she learns later, Claire was breaking up with her boyfriend, and when the exchange became emotional, she ran into the street without looking. Now, she lies in her hospital room, tethered to machines, body swollen, head shaved, in a coma. In the few days that pass from book’s beginning to end, Natalie and her family go through the familiar stages of grief. Friends rally, tempers flare, there are even the painfully realistic moments as when a secret crush kisses Natalie, and she is guiltily glad she is alive. The book’s brevity makes the sadness bearable, but this will stay with readers for a long time. Grades 8-10. --Ilene Cooper

Customer Reviews

The intriguing book you can't put down
This book Would You, by Marthe Jocelyn is and intriguing story about the life of a teenage girl, Natalie, whose life is turned upside down when her sister Claire is hit by a car and is in the hospital in a coma. Natalie thought she was going to have a fun summer with her sister and friends before her sister goes off to college in the fall, but that all changes in the blink of an eye. Everything changes for Natalie and her family when Claire is declared brain dead and taken off life support. Natalie and Claire both have a lot of friends, but Natalie's favorite thing to do with her friends is go pool hopping. Which is when you sneak over to someone's house and jump in the pool, then run away before you get caught, Natalie and her friends never imagined when they rode there bikes past a car accident one night after doing that, that it would involve Claire.
Jocelyn has written a lot of other books, including the series about "Hannah's Collections" which is based on her daughter Hannah. "Would You" was very good, but there is one thing that I would change, after Claire went into her coma it went on and on about how sad everyone was and I thought that was a little boring. Overall it was a very good book that i recommend to everyone.

Courtesy of Teens Read Too
"Would you rather know what's going to happen or not know?" This is the question that starts the powerful story that is WOULD YOU.

Natalie is Claire's younger sister. Claire has just graduated from high school and she's ready to begin the next chapter of her life. She has told Natalie that she is going to break up with her boyfriend, Joe, that night.

But that night, everything changes.

Nat and her friends sit around at the Ding Dong Diner discussing "would you" questions with each other. Little does Natalie know that the opening question would hit so close to home.

As Natalie is riding her bike home one night during the summer, she passes cops putting up police tape on Devon Road. She doesn't think anything of it until she gets home. There she finds out that her sister has been in an accident. She is still alive, but the doctors aren't very optimistic.

WOULD YOU tells the story of Nat's family over the course of a week during one summer. It explores the turmoil that Nat goes through, as well as the despair and struggles of her parents. Nat feels guilty for some of the thoughts that go through her head. Her friends have a hard time with the situation as well, and constantly stop themselves from saying the wrong things.

WOULD YOU is a short story that holds a powerful punch. Long after the cover has been closed, the reader will be pondering the opening question...would you rather know or not? Would it change anything?

Reviewed by: Jaglvr

a realistic, thoughtful exploration of the kinds of tough choices that run through people's heads during moments of tragedy
It's the summer before junior year, and as Natalie endures the start of the year's first heat wave, she says, "Summer just started and it's already boring." She thinks ahead to a long, lazy summer, lifeguarding at the YMCA, sneaking into absent neighbors' backyards to use their pools late at night, and just spending time with her friends at the Ding-Dong diner. Natalie has smart friends who tease each other gently, engage in harmless flirtations and challenge each other with hypothetical, and sometimes gross, moral dilemmas (for example: "Would you rather eat a rat with the fur still on or eat sewage straight from the pipe?").

Natalie's summer will be fine, she guesses, but she knows that at the end of it, her beautiful, brilliant older sister Claire will be off to college. Claire is embracing her future, telling Natalie at the opening of the book, "I have this roar in my head...of anticipation. That it's all just starting. Stuff I don't even know about." As for Natalie, when she imagines Claire leaving for school, she feels sick to her stomach.

Claire's future is bright, and her summer is sure to be glorious --- until one second changes things for Claire and her entire family forever. Returning home from a late-night swimming party, Natalie sees police cruisers and ambulances in a nearby neighborhood. She doesn't connect these sirens and flashing lights with herself until she returns home to find her mother and father nearly hysterical with fear and worry. Claire, they say, has been hit by a car, has a severe head injury and is in a coma.

Over the next several days, Natalie and her family face moral and ethical dilemmas far more strenuous than anything her friends had cooked up before. She feels guilt over "borrowing" Claire's new black blouse and assuming that Claire's shiny new Apple laptop will be hers soon. She clashes with her mother over the state of her (and Claire's) room and with her father over the possibility of Claire's emergence from the coma and the ability to seek revenge. She feels uncomfortable when she is asked to massage Claire's nearly unrecognizable feet, and finds unexpected moments of grace and clarity when she speaks to her unresponsive sister in the lonely hospital room. After a brain scan reveals the worst possible outcome, Natalie and her parents must answer the most difficult questions of all.

There certainly have been plenty of other young adult novels about death and dying, but many of them are unbearably angst-ridden or nauseatingly maudlin and sentimental. WOULD YOU is neither of the above. It is, instead, a realistic, thoughtful exploration of the kinds of tough choices --- and the painful thoughts --- that run through people's heads during moments of tragedy. Although Natalie inevitably compares herself negatively to her golden older sister, readers will recognize her as a bright, articulate, contemplative girl forced to move into a new kind of future before she feels entirely ready.

As Natalie says near the book's close, the ending is "nowhere near happy," but she does, with the help of her remarkably perceptive and supportive friends and family, find a measure of hope, a way of looking peacefully at a future that no longer has Claire in it.

--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl