The Year Without Michael by Susan Beth Pfeffer - Book Review

It has been considered that no child has ever kept a marriage together much less salvage what constitutes the entire family unit. It is true that people have remained bound by the contract and stayed within the same walls for the sake of the children. But the marriage was doomed if the love, care, and respect for each member for the other disintegrated itself in the flames of passionate self-interest to the exclusion of the other. Jody became the staple of stability whose probing prongs pricked the pride of both mother and father in an attempt to salvage what was hell-bound in a basket. She lost a brother but saved a family by her unique ability to sever herself from the problem that threatened to tear the family unit apart but finally, through her efforts and perseverance, kept it together as marriage was originally intended.Linda and Tom Chapman took a respite from each other to think about what should have been thought throughout the marital relationship. Jody, the eldest
of three children, survived a myriad of difficulties with a father who appeared uncharacteristically unfatherly; a mother whose temper, prejudgments, anger, and disappointment with her own feelings of failure as a mother and wife warped her sense of values to the point of lunacy; a younger sister, Kay, whose self-interest swelled to uncommon cosmic proportions; and a brother between them, Michael, who vanished without a trace forever. Could this family remain intact under the pressure of society that empathized with them but remained distant from what they feared could happen to them? Jody absorbed the brunt of the barrage of curious interrogators at the high school while Kay became a celebrity of sorts at the middle school. Kaye was determined that her older brother was already dead; Jody refused to give up hope; Linda became obsessed with her fanatical denial; and Tom did virtually nothing.The story poignantly indicates the elements that linearly emerge from tragedy: shock
, denial, anger, resentment, and finally, acceptance or resignation. The members of the Chapman family engage these emotions in varying degrees of intensity throughout the story, a credible involvement that thrusts them to the brink of annihilation. No marriage is perfect, but some effort must be made to ensure that the vows of devotion to each other through better and worse are respected even when the temptations to avoid, or evade, them are overwhelming.The story is not just a revelation of one tragic episode that is per se very real; it is a metaphor representing the embodiment of any tragedy, physical, mental, or emotional, that can befall a family and threaten its integrity.Evaluation: The story is written as a diary form beginning with the disappearance of Michael and ending with the Chapman family forming a united front to remain a meaningful family in the face of incredible adversity. It traces the emotional levels of those who feel culpability for causing that which
is attributable to fate, chance, accident, negligence, or just the will of God. There was no expected closure as the reader might have anticipated; but all in life is not subject to closure -- not even death for those who believe in the transiency of mortal life before enduring the supposed eternity of immortality. Michael's disappearance may well have been the fortuitous event that saved the siblings that would otherwise have perished at the incapable hands of confused parents.Recommendation: All students in middle and high school could relate to the problems Jody faced even on the personal level she had with her boyfriend, Jim, who abandoned her because he did not understand nor was he willing to cope with what he considered to be abnormal behavior. It is a story that can help students reveal to themselves their sense of values.Teaching: The characters lend themselves to in-depth analyses by methods that research what they say and what they do to reveal their values. Stud
ents can equate their values to those of any of the Chapman family, the grandparents (on the father's side, in this scenario), or the peers with whom they are associated. They can also determine what steps they would take to prevent such an event from happening to them or to cope with it if it did.

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