Because I Am Furniture

Chaltas, Thalia. 2009. (Pub April 2009) Because I Am Furniture. Viking. 356 pages.

I am always there.
But they don't care if I am
because I am furniture.

I don't get hit
I don't get fondled
I don't get love
because I am furniture

Suits me fine.

Anke has a difficult home life, though that is putting it mildly. Her father is abusive. She sees all. Hears all. Yet though a witness, she's somehow avoided being the subject of his abuse. (Though witnessing it is damaging enough as it is.) Can a teen girl break out of her silence and get help for her troubled family?

Because I Am Furniture is a verse novel about hard issues: physical, verbal, and sexual abuse. With all the negative going on in her life, Anke finds great joy in the one positive of her life: volleyball. Can what she learns on the court change her life off the court?

Here's one of the poems I enjoyed from the novel:

They call us
Nopes
the "out" crowd,
we don't fit their
dog-show guidelines
wealthy-beautiful.

We call them
Yups
they have to
all agree,
yup each other
every day on every thing.

And we say
Nope, don't
want any part
of your Yuppitude
so tight
society will burst
with any change
of thought.

But being a fractured, momentary gathering
and not an actual collective,
we say
Nope
individually
with scrambled cadence

and their
Yup
is way
louder.

(25-26)

Other reviews: Teen Book Review, The Compulsive Reader, Laura's Review Bookshelf, Flamingnet, Karin's Book Nook.


© Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews