Hand Me Down

Hand Me Down by Melanie Thorne is a heart-rending story of a dysfunctional family. Liz and Jaime are two sisters and Liz has always tried to take care of Jaime, her younger sister. When their mother marries a sex offender, she chooses him over the girls and tells the girls that they have to leave th......more

Okay, first let me be clear about something, this book was well written. It just was completely and totally not my thing. I lucked into an ARC of it and I had great hopes for it. There have been so many amazing voices in realistic teen fiction over the last half decade and though this was competently......more

This book had the potential to be so much more but fell short of it for me. This is the story of Elizabeth / Liz and the struggle between her mother and her husband and their fragmented family. Liz voiced some of the issues I had with her mother and how she could allow her family to be broken by her......more

A child’s first providers and protectors are his or her parents. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work. In her powerful, provocative, and semi-autobiographical debut novel, Hand Me Down, Melanie Thorne chronicles the epic struggle of a teenage girl suffering from neglect and abuse, determined......more

While the premise of this book sounded right up my alley, and while it started out strong enough, I wasn't ever sold on what was happening. I thought that the ultimate showdown that occurred towards the end of the novel was not really worthy of the buildup in that it all seemed very cheesy and, whil......more