Dirty Little Secrets
Omololu, C. J., 2010.
Dirty Little Secrets.
New York: Walker & Company.
224 pages, hardcover.
$16.99
ISBN 9780802786609.
Format: book
Plot Summary
Lucy seems like any other teenager; she's got two years left of high school, she's striving to do well and get beyond the life she has now. She has a best friend, Kaylie and a long-time crush, Josh. All of this seems fantastic, but Lucy lives with a secret. A secret that she feels she can't tell anyone. The secret: her mother is a compulsive hoarder, so they live surrounded by junk, trash and filth.
Dirty Little Secrets is told over a period of 48 hours, and the reader is able to get a glimpse of Lucy’s world, how she deals with the struggles, trying to balance everything.
To the world, they seem like a normal family. Her older sister Sara is out on her own living with her fiancée, and her brother Phil escaped as soon as he could. Now, Lucy only has to make it two more years while holding onto this secret.
One day, Lucy comes home and finds something she never expected and makes a decision on how she's going to deal with it. Then, over the next 24 hours the reader is pulled into her story - given a little back story and moving forward, how her life came to be, how it is and the way that she wants it to be heading for herself. Only for having been living with the stress and struggle of this deep dark secret does her choice make sense and become her normal.
Critical Evaluation
Omololu does a brilliant job developing her characters so that the reader is pulled in quickly, and may feel immediate compassion for Lucy and frustrations toward her brother and sister who have bailed on her. A reader might even feel some resentment toward her mother for the situation Lucy is faced with, but the reader comes to realize that every family has some sort of dysfunction or issue; we all do. How Lucy deals with it shows one great insight into the teenage psyche.
Through conversations and arguments, as the story moves forward, readers get a solid glimpse that her mom really is and how she came to be a hoarder; it is a disease that gets out of control. Omololu writes beautifully with honest language; the scenes, as Lucy shares her embarrassment and how she dealt with the hoarding, is incredibly realistic.
Dirty Little Secrets is Omololu's first YA novel, and it is evident that she has done extensive research into the disorder of hoarding and how it can affect an entire family. The Children of Hoarders Organization helped guide her writing, as did several young people who weren’t afraid to tell her when she got it wrong, as Omololu wanted her story to be as believable as possible.
Reader’s Annotation
Outside of her home, Lucy appears to be like any other teen girl with a best friend and a guy who could be interested in her, but looks can be very deceiving. Inside, Lucy lives in a world overflowing with junk and mold because her mother is a compulsive hoarder, and Lucy feels that she can't tell anyone so isn't able to get any help.
Information About the Author
Cynthia (C. J.) Omololu was born in New Jersey, then grew up in San Diego. C.J. never set out to be a writer, but she loved to read even from a young age. She attended UC Santa Barbara and only majored in English because she had the most amount of credits when she had to decide her junior year.
Omololu married a handsome Nigerian man, and when her kids were young she realized that there weren’t a lot of bi-racial books for children. She had never written anything longer than a grocery list, even giving up on diary writing by mid-January each year for lack of commitment, yet she decided to give it a try. Those efforts netted her When it’s Six O’clock in San Francisco, inspired by her children’s cousins living in Nigeria or London and having to explain the time differences.
The idea for Dirty Little Secrets came from a magazine article Omololu had read (she did not come from a hoarder home) - as scenes and dialogue played out in her head, she began to write it all down and voilà – a YA novel.
(Omololu, 2011).
Genre
Fiction: Issues – family situations
Read-Alikes
My Life as a Rhombus - Varian Johnson
Undone - Brooke Taylor
Curriculum Ties
For both health and psychology: keeping secrets creates stress and degrades one's well-being and ability to make rational decisions so that sometimes 'normal' is not at all what would be acceptable if the circumstances were different.
Booktalking Ideas
1) descriptive words illustrating exactly how Lucy's home would look to a stranger
2) scene with Lucy and her mom fighting over a pair of lost scissors
Book Trailer Links
Book Trailer by Naomi Bates
Reading Level/Interest Age
Ages 12 and up / YA
Challenge Issues
dysfunctional families, secrets, hoarding, teen drinking, death
First, I would share some of the recommendations used as part of the selection process, including reviews from resources as noted below. Next, I would point out the value in allowing these types of materials to be optional reading as teens grow ever closer to adulthood and making their own decisions. Finally, following our school district’s policy #KEC, after explaining that our school district’s philosophy is that no parent or group of parents has the right to determine the reading matter for children other than their own, I would refer the parent or community member to the building principal, so that he/she can file a written complaint to begin the process of review.
Awards
N/A
Why Title Included & Selection Tools
Every family has secrets, and it is usually when a child reaches their teen years that they start to understand the secrets within their families. This is the first book I've come across that shines a spotlight on an issue that is becoming more of a problem with the consumerism of Americans - and that is the idea of hoarding. I feel that Omololu does an amazing job in the way that she tackled this topic, very realistically.
Goodreads (top 40 Debut YA Authors) and (top 40 YA Novels of 2010) - Amazon
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