Review: Life on the Refrigerator Door

Life on the Refrigerator Door by Alice Kuipers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was recommended by a friend of mine, so I grabbed it off the shelf at the library and dived right in!

Claire and her mother never see each other. They are virtually strangers who live in the same house, but rarely get a chance to see each other. The only interactions that they seem to have anymore are notes they write to one another and leave on the refrigerator in the kitchen.

And boy, do they write some notes! There are times when Claire is lashing out at her mother because she's making her do something, or her mother is grounding her through notes - notes!

But when something big happens to cause a change in their lives, Claire and her mother really need to find a time to talk to one another, because there is a possibility that they may not be able to talk for much longer...

This is possibly the shortest novel that I have ever read. Oh, sure, it has 220 pages, but it seriously only took me 20-30 minutes to read! No lie! There is a page on here that has 3 words total. I just kept turning the page, needing to know more about their stories and feeling like I was flying through their lives.

I'm glad that Alice Kuipers made Claire like a realistic 15/16 year old girl. Because having sweet notes going back and forth between her and her mother is not really realistic for any teenage girl. So when she was being sassy and rude and mean, that made me realize that this could really happen in real life and made Claire a real person.

The one thing I didn't enjoy was that her mother seriously had a relationship with her daughter this way. There had to be a way that she could have switched shifts every week or something and worked it out with her boss, because she is also a single mother and needs to take care of her teenage daughter.

The event that happened? So terrible. Even though it wasn't talked about too much in their notes, the reader knows what is happening and it is very heartbreaking that they are going through this by writing notes to one another.

I'm glad I read this and I will definitely be recommending it to friends!

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