Sylvia

Not this Sylvia.  But this one.  I was never interested in learning much about Sylvia Plath.  I think that I grouped her into this terrible category with Lisa, Bright and Dark, which I read at way too young of an age to understand, I think.  I was eight and the book just terrified me.  The girl who lived across the street from me had an older sister and she and her friends were all reading it, so I wanted to read it to.  After they read LBAD they were reading The Bell Jar and after my nightmare experience with LBAD, I was determined to stay away from Sylvia Plath!  This was a pretty amazing book, though.  Stephanie Hemphill has written this novel is verse and she is very clear that it is a work of fiction, but there is a lot of biographical information in here and wow, I can see why this won the Printz.  I am going to buy her Hideous Love:  The Story of the Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein on audio on payday!  I wish Wicked Girls was available on audio, too.  There is just something that I love about listening to novels in verse.  I enjoy the experience so much more than when I read them.
One of things that made this book so good was that Hemphill says from the start that she loves Sylvia Plath, that Plath's writing has always meant a lot to her.  This reads like a love story, you can really tell that Hemphill was hoping to create a work dedicated to an author she admires so very much.  I don't think I will ever read Plath, but I am going to read everything from Hemphill that I can find!