Love, Ish

Twelve year old Ish Love is obsessed with Mars.  She wants to be one of the first people to colonize.  It's going to happen. There's too much pollution on earth for us to live here forever.

Ish doesn't have many friends, mainly because she is so serious.  She really only has time to think about the environment, being healthy, and Mars.  She used to have a best friend, her next door neighbor Tig, until his family moved to Oregon.

Her world is shaken when she has a seizure during lunch on the first day of school.  She wakes up in the hospital with the news she has a brain tumor.  As Ish undergoes treatment, she dreams of her older self living on Mars.

Now that she is sick, all the lists of things she would miss about earth seem more important.

Karen Rivers's new book was just ok for me.  Ish was just too negative to really want to spend so much time with her, and I understand that negative kids get sick, too.  There just didn't seem to be any real reason for her to be such a downer.