I was surprised by how much I
enjoyed Mary Hogan’s The Serious Kiss.  The best moments occur when
fourteen-year-old Libby Madrigal explains her complete mortification as her life
goes from just normally awful to utterly miserable.  Libby lives with her pet chiwauawa,
her eleven-year-old brother Dirk, her sixteen-year-old brother Rif, her
overweight mother and her alcoholic father.  Her parents fight nearly all the
time, and meal times are a nightmare, because her father picks fights with
everyone.  Libby takes refuge in her friendship with her best friend Nadine and
her dream of finding a boyfriend.  So the story starts out with the usual
stories of high school difficulties as Libby tries to get close to Zack and has
to deal with his aggressive girlfriend.  The plot suddenly shifts though when
Libby’s parents announce that they are moving house immediately. This is
because her father has lost his job and they can no longer afford to live in
their house.  When they get to their new town, the children find that they are
in fact moving to a trailer park, to live next to their father’s mother, who
they had previously been told was dead.  Their Nana turns out to be a great
cook, and she has made her whole mobile home into one large kitchen.  It also
turns out that she refused to talk to her son until he had sobered up, and so
they had not talked for twenty years, and Libby’s father is far from happy
about having to go back to live next to his mother.  So now Libby is living in
a trailer far away from all her friends in a town that she hates.  But worst of
all is Libby’s first day at her new high school.  The teens on the school bus
make fun of her as soon as she boards, and she has a panic attack as the bus
arrives at the school.  She faints as she is getting off the bus and hits her
head on the ground.  So she spends her first day at school with a large bandage
around her head and everyone makes fun of her.  Things could hardly get any worse,
so she refuses to go to school for the rest of the week.

Hogan manages to capture the
excruciating feeling of being stuck with a family that does not work and one
feels strong compassion for Libby as she tries to cope with the injustice of it
all.  Of course, things turn around for her, as she learns to accept her
situation and find the positive.  She makes a friend in her new school and
discovers some great places to eat Mexican cooking in her new town.  One of the
strongest elements in this book is description of Libby’s preoccupation with
food, wanting to avoid becoming fat like her mother, and so restricting her
food intake.  She eventually realizes that she can eat normally and take much
more pleasure in food, without gaining weight.  The last part of the novel is
upbeat, as her father finally enters a rehab program and solves his drinking
problems, her mother starts eating more healthily, her older brother stops
hanging around with a bad crowd, and Libby finds a boyfriend.  The Serious
Kiss is a quick read, and the twists and turns in the plot go by swiftly
without much exploration.  This places the book firmly in the lightweight
"YA" (young adult) genre, but it is both fun and educational about
how to cope with serious family troubles. 

© 2005 Christian
Perring. All rights reserved. 

Christian
Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities
Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also
editor of Metapsychology Online Review.  His main research is on
philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Children