Noteworthy Passages: Forever Changes

Forever Changes by Brendan Halpin
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub. Date: September 2nd, 2008
Pages: 192
Age Level: 14+

Synopsis
5:30 a.m., Brianna Pelletier gets ready for her daily pounding. As she lies on the couch, her dad beats her chest, then her back, coaxing the mucus out of her lungs. The pounding doesn’t take care of everything. Brianna’s held out for a long time, but a body with cystic fibrosis doesn’t last forever. It doesn’t matter that Brianna has a brilliant mathematical mind or that she’s a shoo-in for MIT. Or even that her two best friends are beautiful, popular, and loyal. In the grand scheme of things, none of that stuff matters at all. The standard life, lasting maybe seventy-five years, is no more than a speck in the sum total of the universe. At eighteen, and doubting she’ll make nineteen, Brianna is practically a nonentity. Of course she’s done the math. But in her senior year of high school, Brianna learns of another kind of math, in which an infinitely small, near-zero quantity can have profound effects on an entire system. If these tiny quantities didn’t exist, things wouldn’t make the same sense.

Funny, tear-jerking, and memorable, the author’s second novel for teens introduces readers to an extraordinary girl who learns that the meaning of forever can change, and that life – and death – is filled with infinite possibilities.

Noteworthy Passages

Brianna/3rd Person Narrative; pg. 8
So Dad beat her every morning, then turned her over and beat her some more. She got a fair amount of mileage out of this joke--when people asked how her day was, she would often say something like "It started with some huge tattooed guy beating me, so it can pretty much only get better from here."

Third Person Narrative; pg. 49
Well, that was certainly it for Todd. It wasn't like he'd been some great love or anything; they had been friends, and they'd helped each other. She made sure Todd didn't fail Algebra 2 for a second time; he made sure she didn't die a virgin.

Third Person Narrative; pg. 50
She didn't like the coughing, but she was used to it, and everybody understood. The spitting, though, never stopped being gross and embarrassing, but once she had seen what that stuff looked like on a tissue, there was no way she was going to swallow it.

Adam and Adam's Mom; pg. 137
"Just so you know, Brianna, I don't usually wait on him. I'm trying to teach him a little bit about hospitality here, though it's probably a lost cause. Smart boy, but kind of clueless socially," she teased.
"Hey!" Adam said, grinning, "I resemble that remark!"
"See what I mean?" his mom said. "Gets that corny sense of humor from his father. I can't seem to break either of them of it."
She set the pie down, and Brianna thanked her. "You see, Adam?" Mrs. Pennington said. "That's what you do when someone does something nice for you!"
"Thanks, Mom. Can you get back in your cage now?"

Mr. Eccles and Brianna; pg. 148
Mr. Eccles: "Do you know why I love mathematics?"
Brianna: "Because it blew your mind for free when you couldn't get drugs?"

Kevin and Adam; pg. 157
Just then, Kevin, Stephanie's ex who had been replaced by Tom, staggered up to them. "Hey," he said to Melissa, "where's the whore?"
Melissa would surely have come up with a fantastic reply, but, unfortunately for everybody, Adam beat her to it.
"Aw, jeez, we left your mom on the corner!" he said. "Were we supposed to pick her up?"

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I hope you all enjoyed today's Noteworthy Passages and please feel free to comment with your favorite. You can check out my review of Forever Changes HERE! :)








PLEASE NOTE: This is a feature hosted here at my blog in which I present you with selected passages or quotes that I deem Noteworthy from a book I've just reviewed. My hopes are of course, that these passages will make you want to pick the book up and read it. This feature was started and created by me in January in hopes of making my blog more unique. That being said, I would like to kindly request that you do not use this feature as it was intended to be for my blog only and is not a meme. If you see some one else using it, please know it is without my permission. Thank you.