I was drawn in by Sunny's quick wit and observations on the unexpected turn in her life as her mother considers re-marriage to a guy with two kids thus ending Sunny's center-of-the-universe status; but my sympathy began to falter as Sunny began sounding just whiny. ( )

As the hot Australian summer draws to an end, eleven-year-old Sunny, content to be an only child with amicably divorced parents, finds her life getting much too complicated when her mother's boyfriend moves in with his two children, her best friend begins to develop an interest in boys, and she is contacted by her long-estranged grandmother.

Book information
Title, subtitle Sunny Side Up
Author Marion Roberts
Number of pages 235 pp
First Published 2008 Crows Nest, NSW by Allen & Unwin
Book Type1 Novel
Genre Family
Reading age 9 to 13


Annotation:
One summer Sunny’s life changes so much she has to invent a Stack-O-Matic to store all the secrets she has pledged to keep.
Some secrets are minor like not telling her mother’s boyfriend, who has just moved in along with his two children, that Mum, Alex, looks up the solutions BEFORE doing the crossword. Others are big secrets. Spending time with Granny Carmelene, who has not spoken to Alex in twenty years, is the most potentially divisive. And then there is a birth, and a death. A big summer indeed.
What could be heavy going is made light-hearted by a sparkling text and Sunny’s own tangential mind with its wild leaps from subject to subject. It is obvious she is loved and so all the change and emotional confrontations happen with that security. A friend/enemy, Buster, whose mother seems to have abandoned him, appears as an example of how different life could be.

Themes in this book:
Blame. Girls. Imagination. Melbourne, Vic. Mothers. Promises. Relationships. Secrets. Step-parents and stepchildren.

Allen and Unwin, 2008
(Age 11-14) This book has Sunny, the optimistic but introverted daughter of a naturopath, giving the readers a warts and all account of her life. She and her best friend, Claud run a pizza delivery service on Friday nights, Sunny's mum is about to have her boyfriend, Carl move in, along with his two obnoxious kids and a cat, Sunny's dog, Willow is a bum sniffer and on it goes, a litany of stories all set to collide in an amazingly funny way.

In between, Sunny's tangent monitor rings, as she not only describes what is happening but goes off in different directions, many of which have little to do with the plot but all add a different dimension to the girl's character. All in all, a very funny read for upper primary and lower secondary readers, happy to be diverted with a clever and humorous story, written with charm and alacrity.
Fran Knight ( )