Growing Up

           When you get older, you want freedom, and something to remember it by. However, sometimes people rush into growing up and forget about just simply being a kid. This is what happens in "Finally" by Wendy Mass. This book is about a girl named Rory who has a whole chart about what she's going to do when she turns twelve. However, most of the time, what Rory does ends up in disaster, and she realizes that she is content with being a kid.

              This is one of my favorite books, not just because of the lesson at the end but because Rory is a relate able character and her antics are hilarious. Her ear swells up when she tries to get it pierced (she finds that she's allergic to gold), she loses her phone within fifteen minutes of buying it, her eyes get irritated when trying to put in a contact lens and she ends up wearing an eye patch, and more. Her mishaps always make me feel bad for her, but they also make me laugh. The ironic thing is that Rory was rarely noticed before she turned twelve and started doing new things. Rory has always wanted to be noticed, but she wants it to be because of her looks and her fashion sense, not her disfigurations. But in the end, Rory finds out that it doesn't really matter that she's a little strange and very accident prone (plus allergic to a lot of things). Although she can be a little shallow, she's mostly a good person, and her good deeds pay off. She realizes that there's more to life than pretending that you're grown up. This book made me stop to think about being a kid. Sometimes, I want to be older, but then I remember how great just being a kid is. I have plenty of time to be an adult, so if I start earlier, I'll be sorry later on when I'm tired of being grown up and want to live a tax-free, job-free life again. 

           Something I like about this book is that it doesn't tell a lesson in the normal way. It doesn't make the lesson way obvious, enough to make the entire story cheesy. Nobody spells out the lesson for you, but you know that it's there. And Rory doesn't learn the lesson from anyone around her. She is able to grasp the lesson and find it inside of herself. I think that is what made this book really good.