the love letters of abelard and lily by laura creedle

When Lily is presented with a possible experimental treatment for ADHD, she has to decide whether or not to go for it, which causes her to re-evaluate her personality and her disability. She has a best friend, but the best friend has a new boyfriend and Lily feels awkward around them. She has plans to run away to find her father, who left the family many years prior. She hates the side effects of medication.

She resents her mom for trying to “fix” her, but as she matures through the course of the novel she develops a more realistic sense of what her mom is trying to do and where her mom is coming from. The main focus of the story is Lily and her struggles at school and elsewhere. As they get more comfortable with each other they use their own words more, but during stress or conflict, they return to their fictional counterparts to communicate. Once they establish that, they are able to talk to each other almost entirely in Abelard and Heloise quotes. They both like the classics, and have both read The Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise. When they start texting each other, they discover that they have something else in common. Lily is always accidentally breaking things, and Abelard likes fixing things. Lily and Abelard had gone to kindergarten together and Lily was always fond of him because when she accidentally hit him with her metal lunchbox and scarred him (slightly) for life he didn’t tell on her. He is on the autism spectrum, and he was upset because the handle wasn’t moving smoothly (Abelard says it needed oil). In the office, Lily discovers that Abelard was the one on the other side of the wall moving the door handle. She cannot resist messing with the moving shiny abject, and the wall (it’s one of those folding temporary walls) breaks. Lily is in class one day when she notices that the handle of the divider that separates her classroom from the adjacent classroom is moving. At the same time, I loved this book and wanted to read it over and over again because the characters are so well done. I’ve been told by teachers (recently) that grades aren’t everything, but at one point when Lily got a bad grade I put my head in my hands and cried. I have never been more worried about a character – maybe because I’m the mom of a teenage girl so I’m primed to worry, maybe because my anxiety has been sky high lately, or maybe just because Lily’s voice is so powerful that it’s impossible not to feel that she’s real and that her disasters have meaning. Lily is a teenager who has very severe ADHD.

This book is written from the point of view of Lily, and is told in first-person, past tense. I loved this book but fair warning, I have never been so stressed out by reading a novel in my life. Theme: Forced Proximity (stranded, safehouse, etc)

The love letters of abelard and lily by laura creedle