My Best Friend and Other Illusions

Written by Suri Rosen

Scholastic Canada

978-1-4431-4682-1

240 pp.

Ages 9-12

February 2020

When life becomes difficult, returning to the positive memories of childhood can soothe, invigorate and even stamp out worries. For young children, an imaginary friend can be part of that repertoire of comfort. It allows them to be imaginative, learn how to interact with others, allay fears and explore. But what happens when your imaginary friend reappears in physical form for all can see when you're a young teen?

Thirteen-year-old Charlie Green has a dream and a goal: she wants to attend a gymnastics camp with Coach Mikhailov in Montreal so that she might ultimately join his travelling circus, Circo Circo. But her efforts to raise the money needed have become more difficult. She had been partnering with best friend Holly to perform at parties, doing acrobatics, juggling and walking on stilts but, with Holly's move to Chicago, Charlie is on her own and making a mess of things. Her mother works tirelessly as a music teacher but just doesn't have the extra money for the camp. Her younger brother, Miles, is willing to help through his online poker, but it may get him put in foster care. 

Then Miles discovers someone advertising as Cirkus Celebrations and gets in touch, hoping to find a new partner for Charlie. A boy, who introduces himself as Rudy Jellen, attends a party and works so well shadowing her that it's as if he were a clone of Charlie herself. When it becomes evident that Rudy is homeless and knows everything about her dolls and what she liked to eat when she was little and stories she was told, Charlie realizes Rudy is her imaginary friend from ten years earlier.

Rudy was an archive of joy. (pg. 144)

But as Charlie continues to try to find a way to earn the money she needs, she must also look after Rudy and keep her mother from freaking out, while putting together the pieces of her life that she had forgotten. With Rudy, all things become possible.

Though My Best Friend and Other Illusions is solidly a middle-grade novel in terms of characters, plot and vocabulary, Suri Rosen has extended the story into a more mature one in which children have real worries with money, family, grief, social nastiness and self-confidence. As funny as the premise is with an imaginary friend coming to life, Charlie and Miles' story is a tough one as they attempt to reconcile what their lives are and what could have been.

Everything was so shattered. We'd all lost what we'd wanted and were also so lost ourselves that we couldn't find a way to each other. There ought to be a playbook about the right way to love people. Because sometimes hurting and helping them were all tangled up together. (pg. 136)

Suri Rosen may tie up her story well but it's not the obvious happy ending. Life just isn't like that. Even with an imaginary friend that comes to life, My Best Friend and Other Illusions is definitely real.  And reality sometimes falls short of the illusion of what could be. 

Playing with Matches

by Suri Rosen
ECW Press
978-1-77041-182-1
256 pp.
Ages 11+
September, 2014

Forgive me my ignorance but I have to share my silly prediction about Playing with Matches before I read the book. When I first read the title, I thought the book must deal with arson and lighting fires.  Wrong!  But, though Playing with Matches doesn't have anything to do with fire, teen narrator Raina Resnick learns pretty quickly that you can still get burned with romantic matches!

With her older sister Leah getting married in a few months to Ben and starting their new life together in Toronto, Raina is sent to live with her Aunt Mira and Uncle Eli in Toronto to provide some stability from her parents' regular migrations for her dad's work and to be there for her sister prior to the marriage.  But when Ben calls off the wedding because of Raina's behaviour and Leah blames Raina for ruining her happiness, Raina feels completely friendless.  Not surprising she befriends a woman, Tamara, with whom she regularly sits on the bus to school.  In fact, learning that Tamara is single and desperate to find a life partner, Leah arranges for her to meet Jeremy, the thirty-ish Jewish man who boards with Aunt Mira and Uncle Eli.

This is the beginning of Matchmaven.com, the site Raina uses to communicate anonymously and arrange the match between Tamara and Jeremy which is a hit. (Though not so much for Leah whom Aunt Mira had planned to set up with Jeremy!)  But when Tamara shares the site with her friends, including Leah, Raina is left wondering whether she actually has a gift for matchmaking or if it was just luck.

Meanwhile, Raina is being watched very carefully at home and at school to ensure she's not up to her old antics.  Taking care of her grandmother, Bubby Bayla, Raina finds the older woman has great spirit and skill for getting into her own trouble, but she is supportive of Raina.  Then a fortuitous mistake (while running an errand for her aunt) introduces Raina to a Professor Kellman, a lonely widower with a computer which he allows her to use for her matchmaking, unknowingly.  And the pairing of Raina at school with a geeky girl, Dahlia Engel, to help Raina with her school work brings a tech wizard and friend to Raina finally.

The complexity and hilarity of Raina attempting to control her matchmaking enterprise, which continues to blossom through word of mouth, while trying to make things right with Leah (including finding Leah her own partner) and keeping up her school work and resolving the trouble that caused her to leave her last school and humiliate her family will keep the reader eager to turn the page and learn what else can go wrong or perhaps right. Raina has much to worry about, including the possibility of "matchmaking malpractice" (pg. 146) but with her growing maturity and good heart, Raina has all of the best intentions and is less negligent with her actions and voice.

Playing with Matches is a fabulously unique story–formal matchmaking is definitely not a regular theme in YA–that embeds all the angst of falling in love and growing up and doing right by your family and yourself all under one cover.  I believe that the story will definitely resonate more for Jewish readers who may understand the cultural nuances of dating, dress, and relationships better than I could.  Having grown up in Toronto, I couldn't understand how the only people Raina met were Jewish, or how she happens to enter the wrong house far from home and it be the unlocked home of a Jewish man that her aunt knows, or that her sister's fiancé would break off the wedding because of something inconsiderate Raina did (not murderous, just inconsiderate).  Those inexplicable questions kept me from buying wholeheartedly into the story.

But Suri Rosen can turn a phrase well and get me laughing with the antics of her characters, who are definitely larger than life, and undoubtedly has a plethora of stories to tell if Playing with Matches is any indication of the experiences with which she is well versed. I look forward to reading more from this author (though I hope she will recognize that not all her readers are Jewish and may need a bit more background to understand the full story).