Title: Kissing Doorknobs
Author: Terry Spencer Hesser
Pages: 176
Rating: 3/5
Summary (from Amazon): Fourteen-year-old Tara Sullivan has always been a worrier. On the surface, she has been able to behave like a normal girl. But when she is 11 years old, she hears a phrase that changes her life: Step on a crack, break your mother's back. Now, everywhere she goes, Tara must count every crack in the sidewalk. If she gets interrupted or loses her place, she has to go home and start all over again. As she gets older, her "habits" don't get better--they change and increase. She has to arrange her meals, recite prayers, and chat with her dolls, over and over again.
Tara does not know why she has these habits, she just knows that she has no choice: she has to complete the rituals. Then one day, before leaving the house, she finds herself kissing the fingertips and touching the doorknob...
Review: What a messed up life. Could you picture that? Going throughout your days having to do an action over and over and over and over again? I just can not, for the life of me, picture this situation. Once, I saw a True Life episode where there were a couple teens with OCD, but in this book it is so terrible. Seeing inside her head made me wonder how something like that could happen. All throughout reading this is was questioning myself, "What if one day, I just snap and become like Tara?"
Can that happen? Just one day, BAM, you get OCD? I should have researched this more but until I just actually started thinking about it, I didn't really care much for the concept of this book. That's why it got a meager 3 out of 5 stars. We had to read this over the course of 6 weeks during health and I just finised it today. Most people are like on page 40 but hey, you can't slow me down. Maybe just the stop and go of the reading process made me not get into this book so much but I don't know, it just didn't click for me.
If you want to get a deeper insight on OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), by all means, read this book. Tara was actually a fascinating character, but I felt like the plot had a really slow and gradual pace. Tara's friends, to me, were snooty and eckkkk. I did not like them at alllll. She never really had a support system so that really bugged me. I might recommend this book to a 7th grader but older than that, I'm not sure you could connect.
Here is the video from the True Life episode:
7 comments:
Hmmm... sounds like an ok book. I might check it out if I want to read a book about OCD. Great review though. :)
I remember reading this book a few years ago. It really opened my eyes to OCD.
Sometimes I feel like I'm OCD on a few things, like checking my email incessantly even when I'm not expecting any. Weird, huh?
I have health next semester I wonder if we're reading this.
Really interesting review.
I love your site!
Luisa
This sounds like an interesting book. I sometimes think that I have OCD about certain things... one thing that my friends always make fun of me for is that my books always have to be in the same order: by size. Like, say with my bio stuff, my folder is the biggest, so it has to be on the bottom, with my notebook on top of that (sitting on the bottom left corner of the folder), my bio book on top of that (sitting on the bottom left corner of the notebook), with my planner on top (and you guessed it, the bottom left corner on top of the textbook). If any of my books aren't like this I kind of freak out.
And I'm kind of the same with with organizing things sometimes, too. :p
So I think it would be interesting for me to read this book and see what kind of take I get on it...
Great review! I would've never heard about this book if you hadn't reviewed it. :D
hope.
(And sorry for the long rambling paragraph about obsessive neatness in organizing my classroom materials. :p)
Actually, I think I will check this book out. I like the idea of seeing how OCD complicates the plot. Thanks!
Carolina-Thanks!
towerofbooks- yeahh it really showed a whole side of it to me too!
ya book realm- me too! i just dont like things to be unfinished.
chicklish- thanks! :)
hope-haha i do that too. dont be ashamed (;
barrie- you are veryy welcome!
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