Book Review: Dara Palmer's Major Drama (11-year-old girl, drama and plays, family life, adoptions)(OT)

Dara Palmer's Major Drama, by Emma Shevah (Sourcebooks Jabberwocky Young Readers, $16.99HB, 288pp, 8-12 years, grades 3-7, 2016) Review by Skye Anderson 

Although Dara Palmer is a girl and everything is major drama to her, this book was also loved by adults and even boys: Dara's older brother, a senior in high school, is wise beyond his years.

A bit above the caliber of Dog Diaries, Dara Palmer's Major Drama is written for a bit older child, being longer, at nearly 300 pages, with plots more convoluted and in depth.

We start out with two 11-year-old girls in England who are certain they are and will be major movie stars but, alas, are never selected for school plays. Dara has a cool older brother and a sister with whom she shares a room - Georgia, two years younger and also adopted, but from Russia not Cambodia. Georgia is quiet and studious and looks like the rest of the family - she and Dara hardly speak for most of the two weeks depicted in Major Drama.

About midway through the book, our Dara is faced with a major decision: to take a drama class with a teacher she doesn't think too highly of or to travel to Cambodia with a family who also adopted a girl from that South East Asian country.

Of the 40 chapters, it was not until chapter 17 that I realized the chapter numbers are in Khmer (a language spoken in SEAsia). I felt a bit dumb (OK, quite a bit dumb), because I had read most of the peripherals (introduction, foreward, acknowledgements, etc., but obviously forgot what I read) and had pretty much glossed over the doodling in the margins of each and every page (see cover for example): only when my eyes needed a break, did I look at them to find many were just plain doodles but each page also had one or two meaningful doodles representing where we were in the story.

Author Emma Shevah does not write down to her readers but writes up to them, challenging them to stretch their understanding of words and occasional long convoluted sentences and even made-up words. This would be an excellent book to read in class and to discuss the theme of, or, themes of - one could even argue which of the themes is the theme -  adoption, family jealousy, dreams of becoming famous without working at it, or more. All in all, a great book!