Lurlene mcdaniel biography summary template

  • This emotionally charged novel explores loss, love, renewal, and the ways in which these complex bonds within families and between friends are tested.
  • McDaniel's novels about teens dealing with illnesses like cancer, HIV, cystic fibrosis, were thus right up my strange little alley.
  • Lurlene McDaniel has published 70 novels.
  • Please Don't Die

    January 20, 2024
    It has been a long time since I read this, but I was iffy about it then and don't feel any better about it in hindsight.

    Katie O'Roark (first introduced in Someone Dies, Someone Lives, but I think I first read about her here), aged 17 or so, is serving as a camp counselor or "Big Sister" at a camp for kids with critical illnesses, watching over Amanda (13), Chelsea (15), and Lacey (16). Their ages are given wrong in the book blurb, but I assure you these are correct. You might ask why Lacey is a camper despite being only a year younger than her counselor, and sure enough Chelsea serves as a counselor the next summer at 16. Lacey is definitely not mature enough for that role at this point in her story though. (Lacey is in fact pretty much a huge brat. She grows up a lot in the next book, All The Days Of Her Life.)

    Spoilers from here on:

    Jeff, one of the other counselors (he's a college student), starts a relationship with Lacey. The age diff
  • lurlene mcdaniel biography summary template
  • Author Lurlene McDaniel’s Legacy

    In the past 30 years, Lurlene McDaniel has published 70 novels. And now, she says, it’s time to take a break. The bestselling YA novelist announced her retirement at the end of 2019.

    “I have loved my career,” she said recently over Zoom from her home in Chattanooga, Tenn. “It was a great ride.”

    But now the world has changed, she says, and it’s time for “different writers with different voices” to take her place.

    McDaniels’ early career began after her son was diagnosed with diabetes at 3-years-old.

    “Nobody gets to give or pick what life gives to them,” she says. “I didn’t choose for my son to have diabetes, but you do get to choose how you deal with it.”

    Her first novel, “6 Months to Live,” was published in 1985, and told the story of a 13-year-old girl who is diagnosed with leukemia.  It was an instant hit and was nominated to be placed in a 100-year time capsule located at The Library of Congress, to be opened in the year 2089.

    Bibliotropic

    If you haven’t heard of Lurlene McDaniel before, then congratulations, you probably didn’t grow up in the 90s with a strange passion for morbid stories about teenagers dying from serious illnesses. Aaaand inom just outed myself with that one sentence, didn’t I?

    I used to love her novels. I read pretty much every one I could get my hands on. Couldn’t tell you why I funnen them so fascinating. inom always had an interest in medicin, dating right back to childhood. When I was a kid, I would tell people I wanted to be a pediatric oncologist when I grew up, and I knew what those words meant. McDaniel’s novels about teens dealing with illnesses like cancer, virus, cystic fibrosis, were thus right up my strange little alley.

    McDaniel apparently started writing these sorts of books after her son was diagnosed with diabetes, as a way of coping with the implications of a young individ dealing with a serious illness. After a while, though, inom suspect that