Because She's My Friend by Harriet Sirof is a wonderful book, and is filled with incidents that are easy to relate to.
When 14-year old Teresa D'Angelo first begins to volunteer at the hospital, she doesn't plan on having a good summer. That is, until she meets the interesting girl in room 725. With her horrendous mood swings, awful language, and terrible attitude, Valerie Ross is hardly your average patient. Valerie's right leg is paralyzed after falling off a ladder. Yet it isn't until she leaves the hospital that the problems really start. Valerie is already in a permanent bad mood because the operation performed to fix her leg didn't work.
After she leaves the hospital and goes home, she goes to physical therapy once a week, and then eventually leaves her tutor to go back to school. Eventually, she starts to imagine that her left leg is also paralyzed, and that soon her whole body will become paralyzed until she can only blink. Tests are run and come back negative for her left leg or anything else being paralyzed.
Valerie is eventually placed in a sanatorium after being diagnosed with depression and conversion hysteria. Teri, her closest, and now only, friend comes to visit her often.
1.Yet, Valerie isn't the only one in this book with a story to tell. Teri is trying to cope with her new baby brother, her sister leaving for college, school, the hospital, and her principal. She also discovers that sometimes in life you have to go out of your comfort zone to help those that are closest to you, and need you the most.
I would recommend this book to anybody who understands trust, strength, and what true friendship is really about.

This non-fictional novel, Because she's my friend by Harriet Sirof,is a phychological story about two very different girls who meet at a hospital and become best friends who need eachother to survive.Teri is a young girl who volenteers her time in a hospital over the summer.There she meets a girl her age named Valerie.Valerie is a patient at the hospital who fell and paralized her leg.But later you find out that not only her leg is peralized, her mental state of thinking is also an issue.Its hard to beleive Teri a self described goody good and valerie a witty,wordly,iron willed girl get together and become the bestest friends ever and help eachother throughout life.This book takes place in a little town in Italy.The author used some awesome literary elements to make the book interesting.One thing I like was how she made the book from the point of views of Teri and Valerie.Throughout the chapters it switched from Valerie's thoughts to Teri's.I really liked this book,it was really sad at parts but at other parts it had me smiling from ear to ear.While I was reading the book I felt like I knew the characters and like i was apart of the book.I definitly recommend to those who havn,t read this book,READ IT!

I think Bring Back Yesterday was a pretty good book because it's very descriptive. I liked how the author wrote, "Her clothes always looked like she didn't own an iron." I would recommend this book to those of you who like to read books on Shakespeare or time travel. It's a very imginative and fascinating book.

This is one of my core favorite books. I can't say it is my favorite because of others like The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman, Ray Bradbury sci-fi, & Michael Crichton thrillers; that's the stuff I like. If you liked Gary Paulsen's Hatchet, either you will hate it or just find it diferrent. Hatchet was a physical survival novel, this one is on emotional grounds. Bring Back Yesterday reads like this girl's diary. Lisa, the main persona, is real, intense, anything but flat. She is not average, so she required out-of-the-box thinking on the author's behalf to discover her reactions. She is a loner at school, rather quiet & very imaginative. In some ways she is like me, so it reads as another way my own life could have been written. It is very "relatable". The word applies so well it warranted to be made up. The plot starts with 4 year old Lisa being a full time playmate with her imaginary friend Rooji. Life came second. However, in second grade she becomes preoccupied with school, & Rooji slipped out of her life for years. Then both her parents are killed in a plane crash around 8th grade. She is at first not devastated, but numb. With this sedation for her logical brain, Rooji reemerges as a consolation. Rooji exists in Shakespeare's era, a cousin of Will Shakespeare himself. Rooji is outspoken, brazen, daring, and lively. She is Lisa's opposite (or another part of herself, depending on whether you're willing to take a flight of fancy), but these opposites attract. At first Rooji & her world are an escape, but things heat up in Rooji's life in parallel degrees to Lisa's life. Soon she is blinking in and out of two exciting, dangerous worlds which both need her attention Now. As I said, this is a solid book I return to like a friend.