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Zac and Mia
Author:
Betts, A. J.
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Class:
Fiction
Age: 14-19
Language: English
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LC: PZ7.B466
Grade: 9-12
Print Run: 20000
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ISBN-13: 9780544331648
LCCN: 2013050126
Imprint: HMH Books for Young Readers
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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Pub Date: 09/02/2014
Availability: Out of Print Confirmed
List: $17.99
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Hardcover
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Physical Description:
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292 pages ; 22 cm
H 8.25",
W 5.5",
D 1.09",
0.92 lbs.
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LC Series:
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Brodart Sources:
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Brodart's Insight Catalog: Teen
Brodart's TOP Young Adult Titles
Brodart's YA Reads for Adults
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Bibliographies:
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Senior High Core Collection, 20th ed.
Senior High Core Collection, 21st ed.
Senior High Core Collection, 22nd ed.
Texas Tayshas Reading List
Young Adult Fiction Core Collection, 4th ed.
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Awards:
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Horn Book Guide Titles, Rated 1 - 4
School Library Journal Starred Reviews
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Starred Reviews:
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School Library Journal
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TIPS Subjects:
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Friendship
Medical Fiction
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BISAC Subjects: |
YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Social Themes / Death, Grief, Bereavement
YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Boys & Men
YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Family / Parents
YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Girls & Women
YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Health & Daily Living / Diseases, Illnesses & Injuries
YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Romance / General
YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Social Themes / Dating & Sex
YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Social Themes / Friendship
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LC Subjects:
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Cancer, Fiction
Cancer, Juvenile fiction
Friendship, Fiction
Friendship, Juvenile fiction
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SEARS Subjects: |
Cancer, Fiction
Friendship, Fiction
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Reading Programs: |
Accelerated Reader Level:
4.4
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Points: 9.0
Lexile Level:
630
Reading Counts Level:
5.5
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Points: 15.0
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| Annotations |
| Brodart's TOP Young Adult Titles | 11/01/2014 |
| Cancer brings 17-year-old Zac Meier and bitter, outspoken Maya together during a leukemia treatment in Australia. Upon release, the strangers' paths continue to cross as they try to go back to their normal lives in a story told from two perspectives. 304pp. |
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| Starred Reviews: |
| School Library Journal | 06/01/2014 |
| Gr 9 Up. Seventeen-year-old Zac is recovering from a bone marrow transplant when a loud new patient moves into the room next door. While Zac thinks he knows all there is to know about cancer--how to navigate the physical responses to his leukemia treatments and discuss every detail of his bodily functions and fluids without hesitation--Mia's arrival proves that he does not know everything. The two develop a friendship and learn to see beyond their own sickness and circumstances. Told from each teen's perspective over several months, this story is both heartbreaking and hopeful. Zac and Mia are strong and multifaceted protagonists. While Zac comes across as flippant and condescending at first, the development of his positive energy and affections for Mia make him more endearing as the story progresses. Mia's angst and aggression are painfully understandable as she learns to accept the realities of life after cancer and an amputation. Secondary characters add heart to the narrative, and the plot unfolds steadily, which is satisfying without feeling calculated. While comparisons to John Green's The Fault in Our Stars (Dutton, 2012) are inevitable, Zac & Mia holds its own as a smart, well-crafted story about the importance of friendship and feeling understood. Whitney LeBlanc, Staten Island Academy, NY. 304p. SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2014. |
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| Journal Reviews |
| BookPage | 09/10/2014 |
| Zac knows all the statistics about his leukemia--the survival rate, the chance the cancer will return even if his new bone marrow gives him a temporary clean bill of health. But he's still hopeful he can get back to his old life after months in solitary with only his mother for company--his mother, and the faceless girl fighting her own battle next door. Mia is angry--angry she has cancer, angry the treatment makes her so sick, angry her doctors and mother don't seem to understand she just wants the treatment to be done so she can get back to her friends. The only one who seems to understand, even a little bit, is the boy in the other room. He knows nothing about her except that a sore ankle led to her cancer diagnosis. He calls her lucky--she has good odds. Then Zac goes home to try to regain his pre-cancer life, and Mia goes home with so much less than she ever dreamed. Inevitably they end up together again--Zac desperate to help, and Mia desperate to run from everything. It's almost impossible for a book about two teens fighting cancer to escape a comparison to The Fault in Our Stars, and on a very surface level the two books share DNA: sick teens falling in love, sometimes angry, sometimes hopeful, sometimes resigned. What Zac and Mia does best, however, is capture the feelings of loneliness and isolation. Mia's need to pretend her cancer doesn't exist separates her from her friends even as she interacts with them online, and when the reality of her illness catches up with her she finds it impossible to connect with her former friends, who have nothing heavier than a zit weighing on their minds. Zac and Mia is much more than a book about illness; it's a book about learning to trust a person, and trusting they can care about you when you feel completely unlovable. Molly Horan. BookPage Children’s Corner Web Exclusive Review. BOOKPAGE, c2014. |
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| Booklist | 06/01/2014 |
| Grades 8-11. After a recurrence of his leukemia, Zac is recuperating from a bone-marrow transplant when the room next door becomes occupied by an angry girl with osteosarcoma. The teens begin to correspond on Facebook, but then Mia disappears from Zac's life only to resurface months later with bad news: her leg has since been amputated below the knee. Full of rage, she convinces Zac to take her on a trip before an infection sends her back to the hospital. The two finally reunite and provide each other with needed support. The teens are in stark contrast to each other, though not always in surprising ways. Despite this, their situations are engaging, and their yearning to be treated like normal teens is well crafted. Betts' experience working in a children's hospital is revealed in her details--for example, the waxy taste of chocolate that lingers after chemotherapy. This Australian import, published a year after John Green's The Fault in Our Stars (2012), will draw comparisons to that publishing juggernaut and should find in that horde a ready audience. Rutan, Lynn. 304p. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2014. |
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| Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books | 11/01/2014 |
| R. Gr. 9-12. The hospital is old hat for Zac, who's recovering from a bone marrow transplant after long treatment for leukemia. The experience is new for his hospital neighbor across the wall, Mia, who's got osteosarcoma in her ankle, and who's devastated (despite the excellent outlook for her disease). As the only two teenagers in the adult unit, the two soon bond, so Zac is regretful when he's discharged without being able to tell her goodbye and disappointed when he can't get in touch with her after he goes home to the family farm. Mia, however, is desperately fleeing the reality she can't face after her cancer results in an unexpected amputation, and on her careening runaway journey she unexpectedly finds sanctuary at Zac's home. The shadow of The Fault in Our Stars lies over any such plot, but Australian author Betts takes his own road here, especially in panicky, pugilistic Mia, who has clung to her physical charms as her only power and sees herself now as irrevocably disfigured and therefore valueless. Zac and Mia each narrate portions of the book, allowing readers to get a glimpse at the thoughts behind the faces they present to the world and creating some interesting suspense and irony when one voice goes silent to allow the other to speak. There's complexity in their sometimes thorny relationship that makes this compelling as more than just a romance, but their connection is ultimately satisfyingly heartfelt. Hand this to readers looking for a love story with shadows but not inevitable doom. DS. 304p. THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIV. OF ILLINOIS, c2014. |
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| Horn Book | 11/01/2014 |
| High School. Let's get this out of the way: yes, like a certain book by John Green, this is a novel about two teens with cancer who fall in love. Don't dismiss it as a copycat, though; this Australian import, told from alternating perspectives, introduces two characters who are remarkable in their own right. Seventeen-year-old Zac, who has leukemia, is stuck in the hospital following a bone-marrow transplant. He's obsessed with statistics, especially about cancer and death, so when Mia arrives next door with a diagnosis of osteosarcoma, Zac knows that she's got good odds. "Ur the luckiest on the ward," he tells her during one of their late-night Facebook chats. But once they're released, Mia feels anything but lucky; during surgery, her leg was amputated below the knee. Desperate and alone, she escapes to Zac's family's (delightfully Aussie) olive-oil farm-cum-petting zoo. The setbacks and heartbreak continue -- such as when the pair attends the funeral of a friend from the hospital -- but Zac's loneliness and Mia's bitterness fade as they discover that, despite their illnesses, they are lucky. "What are the odds of this?" Zac wonders, with Mia curled up next to him. "Shared breath, soft flesh, and the staggering possibility that life can be good again." It's these glimmers of hope -- against an incredibly dark background -- that give the novel a deserving place on the increasingly crowded "kids with cancer" shelf. rachel l. smith. 292pg. THE HORN BOOK, c2014. |
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| Horn Book Guide | 05/01/2015 |
| 2. Zac, who has leukemia, knows that Mia's got good odds with her diagnosis of osteosarcoma. But Mia, whose leg was amputated, feels anything but lucky. Desperate, she escapes to Zac's family's olive-oil farm-cum-petting zoo. Like a certain book by John Green, this Australian import is about teens with cancer in love, but introduces two characters remarkable in their own right. rls. 292pg. THE HORN BOOK, c2015. |
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| Kirkus Reviews | 08/01/2014 |
| Desperate to reconnect with the outside world, teen bone marrow recipient Zac's very precise mind is distracted by the arrival of new cancer patient Mia in the 4-by-5-meter room next to his. A single rock track plays on repeat next door ("The newbie's gone Gaga. The girl's got cancer and bad taste?") until Zac pounds on the wall, and a tense bond begins to form. Zac, now "99.9 percent someone else," is a model patient with extended family support back home on an Australian farm. He tracks cancer deaths with grim dedication: "I don't want them to die, but they make my odds look better. I have to believe in the math." Mia--not a Gaga fan after all, it's just parent repellent--tells her high school friends she's just on vacation, rejects her mother and lets anger threaten her treatment. Surrounded by the uncertainty of illness, Zac works from "logic and math," while Mia's decisions are "whipped up by emotion and impulse and I want, I want." Taking its cue from the title, the first-person account starts with Zac's voice, alternates between Zac and Mia in the middle, then seamlessly switches to Mia for the finale, with snappy dialogue throughout. A brief epilogue provides satisfying and realistic closure. Above average in this burgeoning subgenre; it's the healing powers of friendship, love and family that make this funny-yet-philosophical tale of brutal teen illness stand out. (Fiction. 14 & up). 304pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2014. |
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| Publishers Weekly | 06/23/2014 |
| Ages 14-up. At nearly 18, Zac is too old for the pediatric oncology ward, but far younger than the rest of the patients in the adult ward. So when a teenage girl turns up next door, it's a big deal. Outside the hospital, beautiful Mia would never have noticed Zac, but not only does Zac know the ward, he also knows cancer's existential terrors and daily discomforts. The two start by tapping on their shared wall, move to Facebook conversations, and eventually meet. Aside from its Australian setting (Zac's family runs an olive farm/petting zoo that's conveniently on Mia's bus route when she runs away), this is familiar territory. Betts portrays cancer as hard, scary, and isolating, but beatable--or at least bearable--if one isn't facing it alone, and her depiction of a boy trying to hold onto normal life and a girl realizing she can't keep hers from changing has power. Mia's odds may be better than Zac's are (Zac knows: he's Googled it), but in the end, both are better off for having taken a chance on the other. (Sept.). 304p. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2014. |
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9780544331648,dl.it[0].title
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