Changes

|title=We Can Be Heroes

|author=Catherine Bruton

|buy=Yes

|borrow=Yes

|pages=400

|publisher=Egmont

|date=August 2011

|isbn=1405256524

}}

Ben is spending the summer with his grandparents because his mother is ill again. She won't stop going out for runs and is not eating properly. She's gone back to stressing out about having the "right" cutlery and worrying about technology and health hazards. And her beautiful hair has started falling out. Ben's father was killed in the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and with his mother incommunicado, he's feeling very lonely indeed.

I thought this was an important book: brave, honest, funny and very tense. I do have a slight reservation about its length - almost five hundred pages seems a tad ambitious for a kitchen sink drama aimed at tweens - and I thought we could have lost a scene or two and made it both a little more tight and a little less daunting. But otherwise, I loved ''We Can Be Heroes'' and heartily recommend it to you.

Further reading could include [[A Million Angels by Kate Maryon]], a bittersweet story of a little girl coping with a father in the army and away on a tour of Afghanistan, or [[The Reminder by Rune Michaels]], an outstanding look at the various ways a family cope with the death of their mother.

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