I'm sick of hearing how sorry everybody is. Being sorry doesn't help. It just weighs me down, Brendan rails at his best friend. The high-school basketball star has just had the heart-stopping diagnosis of acute lymphocytic leukemia and grapples with fear and anger as he prepares for treatment. Friends don't know what to say. Family members hover too much and insist he will be fine, an overused word that hits Brendan with a bitter aftertaste. Schwartz captures the awkwardness and pain of those dealing with such a diagnosis, especially the patient. Only when he meets Lark, another patient in treatment, is he able to connect with his pain and, haltingly, to the beauty of life, and find hope. In this emotional entry in the Orca Soundings series, Lark's sweetness and wisdom spin out on a trajectory that readers just know will not end happily for her, even though Brendan realizes she has touched his life mightily.

Brendan is popular and respected--he's generally fortunate in life until he is devastatingly diagnosed with leukemia. In treatment he meets Lark, a fellow patient who not only understands him but also teaches him to love life in the direst of times. One goes into remission while things turn tragic for the other--an ending that readers will unfortunately see coming from a mile away.

Gr 9 Up-People are diagnosed with leukemia every day, but Brendan Halleran, 17, never thought it would happen to him. At first, he felt as if he had the flu, but then things started to get worse: bruises, weight loss, etc. Now, he has to have intense chemotherapy and just feels like giving up. He meets Lark, 16, in the hospitalshe's there for a "last chance" bone-marrow transplant. Lark teaches Brendan how to live in spite of his diagnosis. Schwartz packs a lot of intensity into this slim novel, touching on the reality of what having cancer is like for teens, physically and emotionally. Sherry Rampey, Independent Youth Services Library Consultant, Gaston, SC

At the start of Schwartz’s high-interest/low-reading-level Cellular, high-school senior and basketball team captain, Brendan, learns he likely has leukemia. From its opening pages, the novel is striking in its rejection of the appeals to reader sympathies one might expect from a teen “cancer book.” Brendan’s first-person narrative carries the reader from diagnosis through chemotherapy to remission. That Brendan exhibits feelings of isolation, anger and fear is unsurprising and, indeed, realistic, but that he is completely belligerent and uncivil to everyone but fellow-cancer patient sixteen-year-old Lark and their nurse, Harj, is rather more difficult to swallow. Brendan resents the fact-finding of his mother, the despair of his father, and the pity of his schoolmates; he neither feels nor shows any appreciation for their well-intentioned but awkward gestures. Brendan and Lark become close, and with Lark’s help, Brendan begins to face his fears and realize what an "asshole" he has been to his family and friends. Schwartz perpetuates the stigmatization of female sexuality, juxtaposing Brendan’s girlfriend’s promiscuity with an implausible asexual whirlpool encounter with Lark. Schwartz depicts Brendan’s turmoil and negativity with a complete lack of the humor and optimism that make other teen “cancer books” bearable and probably more accurate. It does not help that Schwartz’s medical facts are awry; 7/3 chemo is not used for ALL, priapism is a more common presentation than impotence, and cousins are unlikely marrow donors. The book seems somewhat unrealistic and contrived. –Christina Miller.