Meet Cricket Cohen: Sixth grader. Manhattan resident. Future world-famous geologist. Liar.
Okay, maybe liar is too strong a word, at least according to Cricket herself. Maybe truth-stretcher or creative would be a better term. It’s not that she means to lie. But sometimes stretching the truth seems like the way to make new friends, which is necessary after your best friend changes schools and you find yourself sitting alone on the playground. Or when your teacher asks you to write a memoir, and a memory you wish you had of traveling with a world-famous geologist is so much more exciting than anything you’ve ever actually done.
It’s that memoir that’s landed Cricket in trouble most recently. After a meeting between her teacher and her parents, Cricket is given a good-faith opportunity to rewrite the memoir, even though the school year is over and grades have already been handed in. While Bunny and Richard Cohen head off to the Hamptons to find a summer home they can’t afford, but that improves their fundraising image (talk about truth-stretching), Cricket is left behind in Manhattan to write her essay.
It could be worse. Also left behind is Cricket’s grandmother, Dodo, and nobody understands Cricket better than Dodo. The two have been inseparable since Cricket was young and would spend summers with her grandmother in California, swimming, playing gin, and, most importantly, making up stories. Now Dodo lives in the apartment next door. Her refusal to cooperate with her caretaker—giving her the slip, locking her out—is a constant source of frustration for Cricket’s mother. But Cricket understands. Dodo doesn’t need anybody taking care of her, she’s a free-spirit, just like Cricket.
When Dodo suggests she and Cricket pack their bags and go on a grand adventure, Cricket agrees. Anything is better than writing her essay. It takes a little while to get going—Dodo can be a bit distracted and forgetful—but soon the two are off to Central Park. After Cricket shows Dodo her favorite rock formations, and they’re almost killed by a runaway roller skater, Dodo decides to rest by checking into the historic Pierre Hotel, a place she often stayed in her younger days. It’s the best sleepover Cricket has ever had, with room service and old movies, until Dodo wakes up in the middle of the night confused and sure her clothes have been stolen. It’s at that point that the grand adventure begins to turn, and while Dodo is still her fun-loving, eccentric, passionate self, we start to see signs that perhaps there’s more to Dodo than we realized, more than Cricket realized, a fact that is confirmed when Dodo and Cricket find themselves in the local precinct.
In ways both humorous and touching, The Half-True Lies of Cricket Cohen explores the early stages of Alzheimer’s. As with many families, the Cohens are at first unaware of the little changes. The occasional forgetfulness, the changes in behavior all can be explained. Using Cricket and her own tendency towards exaggeration, Catherine Lloyd Burns subtly points out the difference between eccentricity and symptoms of something more. But beyond that, she also uses Cricket to show how far love, patience, and the bonds of family go towards comforting an individual with dementia. In one wild weekend, Cricket and Dodo both come to realize the shifting nature of memories, the importance of family, and, as perhaps Cricket always knew, the immense power of storytelling.
The Half-True Lies of Cricket Cohen is on B&N bookshelves August 22.
The post The Half-True Lies of Cricket Cohen Is a Story About Memories (Both Real and Make-Believe) appeared first on The B&N Kids Blog.