Beyond the Surface

         Life for me can seem bad, but at the end of the day, I have a family that cares about me, good friends, food to eat, and a good home. However, Daphne from "Daphne's Book" by Mary Downing Hahn isn't so lucky.
          Daphne lives with her grandmother, who is dealing with a lot of issues and cannot take care of her and her little sister Hope. Their house is not an good place to live, and they can barely afford to keep it up. Daphne goes to school and is terribly bullied, and she doesn't feel safe leaving 5-year old Hope along with her grandmother.
          However, the main character in this book isn't Daphne, it's Jessica, a girl who is in Daphne's class at school. Jessica leaves a pretty good life, and she's popular. She goes to school with Daphne, and feels bad when Daphne gets teased, but she never does anything about it because she values her popularity. But everything changes when Jessica and Daphne are assigned to work on a picture book together and Jessica learns the truth about Daphne's life. Jessica has to make the decision whether to befriend Daphne or to keep her old friends, or more importantly, to tell Daphne's secret or to keep it to herself.
          I think that Jessica is a very relate able character because she is very conflicted. She wants to be kind to Daphne but she's afraid of being bullied for befriending an outcast. She wants to tell someone about Daphne's pain, but she doesn't want to break her promise to Daphne. This story is a great coming of age story because it's about learning to do what's right and following your heart. I like that this story was so real, from the characters to the conflicts. Sadly, in the real world, people live like Daphne, and as much as we want to try to deny that, we can't. Another thing I liked about the book was that most of the characters (aside from a few of the girls that teased Daphne) had real depth. In a lot of teen books, everyone is kind of one dimensional, but in this book, the characters seemed real. I like how you could see people and their lives beyond the surface.
          This book taught me a lot of things about friendship and the real world. It taught me that life isn't always how it seems in TV and movies. Although this book had a pretty satisfying ending, and everything pretty much turned out okay (which I actually appreciated because the rest of the book dealt with so much tough stuff, it was nice to know that it wasn't a complete tragedy in the end), it didn't end up perfect. That really describes life. Life can be really hard, but everything ends up turning out fine. Usually not great, but fine.