Sarah's Page

Anna Murray

Sleeping Bear Press, 1998
$14.00 hardcover
136 pages

This is how the summer begins:

Her house falls into the ocean during a hurricane.

She has an accident riding a horse.

Her parents send her to Michigan to stay with her older sister Amy for the summer.

Michigan! Teenage Sarah is a self-avowed New York City girl; she's snob and proud of it. Her sister Amy lives in an old farmhouse on a dirt road. "You'd think that living in an old farmhouse would be romantic," Sarah says in email to her best friend Kate back in New York. "But this is MICHIGAN and you'd be WRONG! . . . In rural Michigan, living in an old farmhouse means drafty walls, bad plumbing, rodents, and an electrical system so ancient you can't turn on the toaster and the hair dryer at the same time." Sarah isn't even sure she knows how to be Sarah if she's not in New York.

Little by little, of course, she learns to enjoy living "out in the country." There's the dalmatian Ellie who adores Sarah and expects long walks and a share of the bed. There's Grand Traverse Bay, an injured race horse that Sarah is trying to nurse back to health. There's Amy herself, whom Sarah has not really seen for several years, and Amy's husband Jeff. And, via email, there is still Kate.

Sarah's Page is an epistolary novel, which means that its story is told in a series of letters or other correspondence. This is an old idea, but Anna Murray brings it into the new millennium by telling this story entirely in Sarah's email to Kate, complete with subject headers and emoticons. "Old ideas," writes Sarah to Kate, "only now they're clickable." :-) Sarah's smart-alecky voice is as entertaining as the day-to-day adventures she describes, and the new way she learns to think about things (including herself) changes her life far more than a move to Michigan ever did.

And Sarah's web page itself -- http://www.sarahspage.com -- is real. Every time Sarah tells Kate to look at something on the web page, you can, too. (You don't need to, understand: Sarah's Page the book makes perfect sense without the web site.) Her research on hurricanes, Michigan, and exploding hay, her "cool animation of the house going into the ocean," and Kate's replies back to Sarah are there, all coordinated by the dates on Sarah's messages. You can also email Sarah, play games, and more. They complement each other well, book and web site, but since this review is about Sarah's Page the book, I'll let you explore the web site on your own.

Visit Sarah's web site at http://www.sarahspage.com.

Reviewed by Wendy Morris. © 2000 by Wendy Morris.

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