A sensitive portrayal of an HIV+ girl that never falls prey to sensationalism or slowed down by its educational content.

Emerson Price is 13 years old. Diagnosed with HIV when she was 4 years old, she takes medication three times a day and is otherwise healthy-but the medication didn’t work for Emerson’s mother.  Newly motherless, Emerson moves in with her father and stepmother-but without the one person who genuinely understood how living with HIV felt, Emmy feels unmoored.  Following Emmy from school to a camp for HIV positive girls, Positively follows Emmy as she attempts to come to terms with both her illness and the loss of her mother.

I’ve always felt that it’s very difficult to accurately portray grief while simultaneously encouraging identification with a character.  Nobody is at their most appealing when they’re in pain.  Grief makes you self-involved as you work through your own emotions, grief is the same depressing thoughts over and over.   Very often the character comes across as whiney or the author has the character “get over it” in an unrealistically short period of time. Neither happen in Courtney Sheinmel’s Positively, an extremely sensitive and moving portrait of a young girl growing up with a deadly disease.

The basic questions-what is HIV, how did Emmy get it-are quickly dispensed with in the first chapter.  Getting the information across to the reader without slowing down the novel or veering out of character can be a real challenge for writers-and Courtney Sheimel nailed it.  We learn a lot about HIV from reading Emmy’s description of her disease-but we learn just as much about Emmy.

This would make a interesting accompaniment to Deborah Ellis’ The Heaven Shop-which follows a 13 year old african girl after the loss of her parents to HIV.  The themes of loss are similar, but the circumstances of the two girls are obviously very different

Grade Level: 6-7 (approximate)

Rating: ★★★★★