So+B.+It

Weeks,S. (2004). //So b.it.// New York,NY: Harpers Collins Publishers.

The book I read was called //So B. It//. This book was written from the view point of a 12 year old girl whose name is Heidi and she is living with her mother and her neighbor. Her mother has a mental disability and her neighbor who has agoraphobia, which means she has a phobia of going outside. Heidi does not know where she came from, who her father is, or her mother’s actual real name. Heidi and her mom just showed up one day when Heidi was an infant at the neighbor’s home, and her neighbor took them in and has taken care of them for the past 12 years.

 Heidi has many responsibilities that a typical 12 year old should not have, since the neighbor is agoraphobic then its Heidi’s responsibility to do the laundry, get the grocery’s and basically anything that involves leaving the apartment. Heidi finds a picture of her mother when she was younger at an institution in New York so she then sets out across the country to find out about her past. This is a wonderful story about a girl who is driven by the need to find out about her past and her ability to deal with her handicap mother.

 This book is a great read for adolescents. It is written from the prospective of an adolescent and she speaks about many subjects that adolescents can relate to themselves. Every adolescent wonders about their past and where they came from. By fining out this information they can be able to relate to this world they live in. Adolescence is a time where they are trying to discover who they are, and a person’s past is a huge part of that. Heidi may have a different home life than many adolescent but in the long run, she is just trying to find out who she is, like every other adolescent out there.

· Teachers could use this book in language arts to have students write their own biography about themselves. They could do a family tree and write a short biography to go along with it

· This could also be used for geography, so that students can track on a map what states Heidi has to travel through in order to get from one side of the country to the next.