The Steps

From School Library Journal
Grade 5-8-Annabel's parents, Angelina and Jack, met in New York City, fell in love, moved in together, had their daughter, and then, much later, became adults. Annabel's fresh and funny narration begins after Jack and Angelina no longer live together. In fact, he has moved to Australia, remarried, and started a new family. Angelina is involved with the divorced father of "the dorkiest kid in the whole of the seventh grade" in Annabel's school on Manhattan's Upper West Side. During Christmas break, the 12-year-old is sent to visit her father in Sydney. Her jealousy of the "steps," Lucy and Angus, gradually erodes as her understanding increases. When Lucy and Annabel run away to Melbourne to see Lucy's grandmother and her friends, the girls have a "moment"-that memorable, pivotal instant that changes relationships and sparks lasting friendships. In the end, Annabel realizes that both of her parents love her, and she begins to call them Mom and Dad. In spite of the confusing family configurations with the "bazillion stepbrothers, stepsisters and half siblings," the narrative is fast, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and gradually reveals insight into families and individuals. Though Annabel uses contemporary references and present-day language, her concerns and emotional responses are timeless. Other characters, adults included, are well drawn, developed through interaction with Annabel and her own wry observations. A breezy, compelling, humorous glimpse of families trying to cope as they transform.Maria B. Salvadore, District of Columbia Public LibraryCopyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Twelve-year-old Annabel didn't want to spend Christmas visiting her father and his new family in Sydney, Australia. But what happens is so momentous that it must be recounted in order to explain her expanding family, complete with its new members, "The Steps." Caitlin Greer's narration manages to perfectly express the preteen's brattiness and determination to steal her father back, along with her sadness and eventual reconciliation in this heartwarming tale of the ultimate blended family. The only problems arise in the attempt to portray the Australian accents of Annabel's new family members: It might not occur to listeners that since Annabel is telling the story, an imperfect accent is to be expected. E.J.F. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Gr. 4-7. As the book's clever cover shows, Annabel's Australian family has been blended to the max. Annabel and her mother live with Bubbee. Jack, Annabel's father, has moved to Australia with his wife, Penny; Penny's children from a previous marriage, Lucy and Angus; and baby Beatrice, Jack and Penny's child. Annabel is not very happy about any of this, and when she heads to Sydney to meet her new family, hostility is the word of the day, especially after she sees how Lucy and Angus have co-opted her dad. Wittily written, this follows a predictable path as Annabel's animosity turns to tolerance, then acceptance. The Australian setting makes a nice change, however, and a touch of holiday romance also adds appeal for the age group. Cohn uses pop-culture references that will soon date this, but until then, readers will identify with the mixed-up emotions that mixed families engender. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
"If you think it's hard keeping track of all the Steps in my life, try being me." "The Steps" in Annabel's life are her "bazillion" stepbrothers, stepsisters, and half siblings. She is spending her Christmas vacation in Australia with her dad and his new family, and she hopes beyond hope that she can convince him to come back to the United States with her. But as Annabel realizes how much happier her dad is in Australia, she has to reconcile her jealousy of his new family with her desire to be a part of it. Can she share her father with them without losing him entirely? Annabel's account of her stay in Australia is funny yet tender, and is certain to ring true to anyone with a family that isn't quite traditional. Rachel Cohn, whose perfect grasp of teens' feelings came through so strongly in Gingerbread, now proves that she understands preteens just as well.


Card catalog description
Over Christmas vacation, Annabel goes from her home in Manhattan to visit her father, his new wife, and her half- and step-siblings in Sydney, Australia.


About the Author
Rachel Cohn has occasional delusions of Mary Poppins nanny grandeur. A graduate of Barnard College and a secret boy-band fanatic, Cohn lives and writes in Manhattan. She is step free but has two wonderful teenage half sisters who reside in England. Rachel Cohn is the author of Gingerbread, which School Library Journal, in a starred review, called "funny and irreverent reading with teen appeal that's right on target" and which Teen People called "unforgettable."


Excerpted from The Steps by Rachel Cohn. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1 If you think it's hard keeping track of all the Steps in my life, try being me. The Steps are the bazillion stepbrothers, stepsisters, and half siblings my parents keep laying on me. Follow this. First, there are Angelina and Jack, my parents. I've called my parents by their first names for as long as I can remember. Maybe if they were normal parents who stayed together (or even bothered to get married), or maybe if they had regular day jobs, I would call them Mom and Dad, but that would be, like, so Brady Bunch, and we are so not Brady. Besides, Angelina and Jack were the ones who taught me to call them by their first names. Angelina said Mom was "too uptight a word" for her to hear, and Jack said being called Dad made him feel like an "old coot." Angelina's an actress and Jack was a comedian. They met when they were both waiters at a hip restaurant in Manhattan. They were "young, dumb, 'n' in love," according to Bubbe, my grandma. They moved in together and had me. I'm Annabel Whoopi Schubert and I'm twelve years old, but I'm "going on thirteen with a vengeance," as Bubbe says. After Angelina and Jack finished being "young, dumb, 'n' in love," they became yelling and fighting adult folks. After a couple really bad years being miserable all the time, they split up when I was nine. Then Jack met Penny and moved to Australia to be with her. Penny has a daughter, Lucy, who is the same age as me, and a son, Angus, who's in kindergarten. They call it "kindie" in Australia. Jack thinks it's clever that those people in Australia are always cutting off words and adding ie to them, like noodies for noodles and brekkie for breakfast. I don't think it's clever. I think it's lazy. My baby half sister, Beatrice, who is the daughter of Jack and Penny and also the half sister of Lucy and Angus, will end up talking like that one day. Imagine that, my own blood sister, and she's going to speak with an Australian accent and cut off her words and end them in ie. Please. Back to Angelina, my mom, who got way too into her role as PTA treasurer and started dating the president of the PTA, Harvey Weideman. Harvey is the divorced father of Wheaties, only the dorkiest kid in the whole seventh grade. I don't even remember Wheaties' real name. That's what we call him at our school, the Progress School on the Upper West Side. Wheaties is short and scrawny and goes around singing folk songs. He's the last boy you'd ever see on a cereal box. Now Angelina's pregnant, and she and Harvey are getting married, so I'm going to have another half sibling and another step. I wonder if I will be the first girl in the world with a stepbrother called Wheaties. The other step is Lucy and Angus's former stepbrother, Ben. He's not my step technically, so I think it's okay that I kissed him once. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back to Christmas break. It all started because Lucy stole my dad. Copyright © 2003 by Rachel Cohn


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An oh-so-New-York 12-year-old struggles to sort out her relationship within what might be called the ultimate blended family (the front cover has a helpful diagram of all the relationships). Annabel has the sort of relationship with her parents where she calls them by their first names. Even after they split, all was pretty much okay until Jack moved to Australia to marry Penny, become Angus and Lucy�s stepdad--an eventuality that has Annabel seeing red--and father Beatrice. Annabel doesn�t really want to go to Australia over the Christmas break, but she does, hoping somehow to steal her father back. What she discovers, however, is that he�s happier than he ever was and is utterly disinclined to move home, however much he misses her. When Lucy and Annabel, at first enemies but later, convincingly, good friends, sneak off on a trans-Australia train trip, they set into motion a family crisis that brings all members of Annabel�s family to Sydney (including her new stepfather- and stepbrother-to-be; it�s been a busy vacation for her mother, too) in a sort of giant group hug that, however unlikely in the real world, is nevertheless a nicely satisfying way to end the story. It is a relatively predictable tale of raw feelings, jealousy, new friendships, and reconciliation, but it is enlivened both by Annabel�s sassy voice and by the acuity of her observations: "I had . . . never met them, and I knew that in those two years they would have developed a secret family language only they could understand." If there�s rather a lot of parent-to-child explaining about love and relationships, readers can still only hope that their own families can sort themselves out as well as Annabel�s. (Fiction.11-14)


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