anastasia
Written on Jul 8, 2018
Born and raised in the Midwest, Jersey Cameron knows all about tornadoes. Or so she thinks. When her town is devastated by a twister, Jersey survives -- but loses her mother, her young sister, and her home. As she struggles to overcome her grief, she's sent to live with her only surviving relatives: first her biological father, then her estranged grandparents.
In an unfamiliar place, Jersey faces a reality she's never considered before -- one in which her mother wasn't perfect, and neither were her grandparents, but they all loved her just the same. Together, they create a new definition of family. And that's something no tornado can touch.
- ISBN10 0316245534
- ISBN13 9780316245531
- Publish Date 29 May 2014 (first published 1 January 2014)
- Publish Status Withdrawn
- Out of Print 29 March 2021
- Publish Country US
- Publisher Little, Brown & Company
- Imprint Little, Brown Young Readers
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 288
- Language English
Reviews
readingwithwrin
Written on Jun 17, 2016
Living in the Midwest Tornado warning just start to become a part of life. Most of the time there nothing at all and expire within an hour. Sometimes though they can mean that real danger is possibly going to get you. And if you yourself haven’t had to deal with a tornado then most likely someone in your family has. At times we have all ignored the warnings because of how often they happen, and how most of the time they don’t ever turn into anything. But in the back of our minds is also the thought that it could be real this time and we better be paying some sort of attention. Now thanks to the advance in technology the news station can give us updates for exactly where we are instead of just the it’s in your general area.
"But when I woke in the morning, I was no longer confused about where I was. I was no longer waking up to those blissful thirty seconds or so of forgetting about the tornado.I was aware of it from the very moment I opened my eyes. It was all I could think about."
Jersey is a teenager that's kind of angry about certain things that have changed in her life recently.
Until her mom got a new boyfriend it had just been Jersey and her mom. Now it’s Jersey, her mom, her stepdad and her half-sister meaning now her mom has hardly any time for her and she is always expected to help out around the house like most teenagers. She doesn’t want to though and ends up taking it out on those around her. That is until the tornado changes everything and Jersey ends up going from family member to family member. Until her grandparents take her in and give her a second chance at life. But will Jersey take this chance by knowing how much her mom disliked her parents and the town they lived in.
"How did I know who this woman really was? How did I know she wouldn't turn on me the way Dani's mom had, or give up on me the way Clay had, or lie to me the way Mom had, or cast me out the way Ronnie had? If I'd learned anything from the tornado, it was that I couldn't trust anyone but myself
Brown did such an amazing job with this book. Jersey grew so much after the Tornado and the stuff that she had to go through with her dad’s family, and how her step-dad treated her was absolutely awful. Nobody should have to suffer that much heartbreak in such a short amount of time.
"I'm just going to keep redefining everything for as long as I need to, because I'm pretty sure that's the best way to keep on going when you feel like you've lost it all"
Bianca
Written on Jul 24, 2015
I realized that the worst part of someone you love dying suddenly isn't the saying good-bye part. It's the part where you wonder if they knew how much you loved them. It's the part where you hope you said and did enough good stuff to make up for the bad stuff. It's the part where there are no second chances, no going back, no more opportunities to tell them how you feel about them.
Rowena
Written on Oct 9, 2014
Angie
Written on Jun 12, 2014
Torn Away was my first Jennifer Brown novel, and it most definitely will not be my last! I can't really say that I liked it, because the story is super depressing, but it kept me flipping pages. I also thought it wasn't affecting me that much, but then I read the last sentence and tears formed! So yeah, it kind of snuck up on me.
Jersey is home alone when a tornado hits. It passes right over her house, ripping most of the walls away. When the storm passes, all she wants is her mom and sister who were at a dance class. A couple of days pass without their return, but eventually her stepfather comes back and breaks the news. Unable to deal with his grief, he sends Jersey away to live with her absentee father and grandparents, where she's even more alone than she was in that basement.
I immediately liked Jersey. She felt like a real, normal girl to me, and probably like someone I could be friends with. Torn Away begins with her being not so nice to her baby sister, and I actually like how she wasn't portrayed as the perfect older sister and daughter. She got annoyed and was stubborn, and that felt very genuine to me. It's also a huge source of regret, since Jersey of course, wishes she had been nicer to her sister on that final day. However, I didn't connect with Jersey as much as I wanted to, since a lot of the story is about her relationship with her sister. I'm an only child who hates kids, so I just couldn't identify with this. I did majorly relate to her relationship with her mother though, since they were close, but also had their tensions.
Most of Torn Away is just sad and upsetting. Jersey loses everything in that tornado: her house, her possession, her family, and any sense of home that she had. Her father and his parents are terrible people! The grandparents preach about helping family, which is great, except that they treat Jersey as an obligation and hindrance rather than a true part of the family. And in fact, they don't even have the resources to be helping her! It's just an all around horrible situation, which she thankfully gets out of once her stepfather takes her to her mother's parents, whom she's only heard bad things about. Of course, there's always two sides to every story, and Jersey learns that she may not have known her mom as well as she thought until she grows closer with her grandparents.
Torn Away was a mostly sad story, but the ending was full of hope and the start of happiness. There's a lot of focus on family, and what that means. Whether it's simply blood or something you feel deep inside. I loved how Jersey's story was straightforward. There's no exaggerations and unnecessary dramas. It's just real life, which isn't all sunshine and rainbows, but it's also not a soap opera dramafest. It just is what it is.
Read more of my reviews at Pinkindle Reads & Reviews.
bookishzelda
Written on May 7, 2014
Oddly enough when I was reading the part about the tornado coming it happened to be a Tuesday and I could hear the practice tornado drills going off. How creepy. It was easy to connect with this book right away. I live in Chicago suburb so we don’t have Tornadoes as bad as the south and Missouri. I think because we have more population but we do have an area we call Tornado alley. I remember when I was kid a couple tornadoes coming through. So when Jersey is acting nonchalant about the sirens and not going in the basement right away, I totally understand. I do that all the time. Well I used to anyway. I honestly won’t live in a house without a basement. It’s a deal breaker, will be no matter where I live.
I love this book for many reasons. One is that the tornado is a big part of it, it’s not just the disaster that happened and we are seeing the aftermath. Jennifer writes about before the tornado, during the tornado and then the devastation and confusion after the tornado. This is all before Jersey is even shipped off. What would you do if your whole street had been destroyed, I have no idea what I would do. Probably just stand there a lot like Jersey did. I really like how the book touched on how the community dealt with it as much as the character herself.
Another thing is this book is not about love in the romantic sense. It’s about Jersey finding out who she is after losing everything. Even Jersey doesn’t focus on the physical things, it’s her mom and sister that she often thinks about. We see glimmers of happy memories and some regrets. She didn’t spend enough time with her sister or she didn’t tell her mom how much she loved her. Those kinds of things. We really see Jersey’s grief and how she processes it. She is put in a very difficult situation by her stepdad and it’s a struggle for her to find peace with their deaths.
I was so mad at so many people in this book, starting with Ronnie. Way to make a bad situation worse for Jersey. I kept thinking what if Jersey and Marin survived what would you have done then! I wanted to smack him. Plus the family situations that Jersey ends up with are definitely crazy. I kept thinking can’t this girl catch a break. The book is a journey for Jersey and she ends up learning things about her mom that she never knew. Some things her mom said were true and some were not. As she learns her moms past she becomes more connected with her.
The writing is good, the characters are good, and the plot is definitely good. It’s a quick read and highly recommend it. If you are looking for something that is not so focused on romance and is more about the characters then this book is perfect. I really could not put it down once I started.