Friends with Boys (Paperback)
$14.25 - Save $1.74 10% off - RRP $15.99 Free shipping worldwide (to United States and
all these other countries) Usually dispatched within 48 hours | |Short Description for Friends with Boys After an idyllic childhood of homeschooling with her mother and roughhousing with her older brothers, it's time for Maggie McKay to face the outside world, all on her own. But that means facing high school first. And it also means solving the mystery of the melancholy ghost who has silently followed Maggie throughout her entire life.
Full description- Publisher: FIRST SECOND
- Published: 01 March 2012
- Format: Paperback 224 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: Fiction | Horror & Ghost | Family | School Stories | Graphic Novels
- ISBN 13: 9781596435568 ISBN 10: 1596435569
- Sales rank: 56,653
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Reviews for Friends with Boys
Maggie Starts High School & Her Ghost Continues to Haunt Her
Reason for Reading: I enjoy the author/artist and was intrigued that the book was about homeschooled teens.
The author is obviously writing from her own life seeing as she was homeschooled until high school and has three brothers. This is the background of the main character in the book, added to Maggie's life is that her mom has just skipped out on them without her really knowing why and Maggie has been haunted by a 17th century ghost since she was about six. I really enjoyed this book. I think it gave a fairly accurate portrayal of homeschool life though Hicks did treat it like it was the 1990's, not now when it has become pretty much mainstream. (I was homeschooled for high school in the '80s and have been homeschooling my children in one way or another for the last 19 years.)
The title is a little deceptive as I thought we might get into dating and stuff, but it refers to sisters being friends with their brothers and I really appreciated this theme. I don't have any brothers but I really envied the close relationship Maggie had with hers and how the relationship between Lucy and Alistair developed also. The book deals with other typical teen subjects such as being new to a school, dealing with bullies, how to make friends and what it's like when your brother is popular but you are not. Hicks artwork is as expected and truly measures up to her other work making it a delight to look at. The only problem with this could be that she draws her characters very similar and the main two females in this book are almost identical to the two females in "The War at Ellesmere" with different hairdos.
I loved the characters, the story about the teens at school, the family dynamics, etc. but the bit about the ghost haunting was an oddity. It stuck out at first and didn't seem to fit in with the rest but eventually it came together and found a place within the larger scheme of things. Only, while I was happy with the way things ended for the humans in the story, the ghost ending was rather abrupt and left many unanswered questions. These kinds of endings bother me, but it does give one thoughts to ponder. Taken as a whole, this is my favourite book by Faith Erin Hicks so far and the small irritations I had with it don't amount to the lessening of my enjoyment, so I'm sticking with the full 5 stars. by Nicola Mansfield

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