Losing Forever

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Like Friesen’s two previous excellent young-adult novels, Losing
Forever is imbedded in the emotional complexities of family
relationships.

Not only is 15-year-old Jes facing her mother’s remarriage in a
month, but she is also suddenly confronted with having to share her room
with a new stepsister, the tall, blond, beautiful, “perfect” Angela,
who is also 15. Jes once had a younger sister, Alberta, who died
accidentally at the age of two, and Alberta’s death launched a chain
of events that ultimately led to Jes’s parents’ divorce.

Jes’s weekends are spent with her father, their special place being
the “family” cabin at Mara Lake, north of Vernon, B.C. While Jes
would like things to stay the same forever, her summer instead becomes a
time of losing forever. Nevertheless, over the novel’s time span of a
few weeks, in addition to reestablishing her relationship with her
mother, Jes grows as she discovers the truth about her father’s role
in the divorce, accepts her new feelings for her lifelong male friend
Sam, reaffirms her Angela-threatened friendship with best friend Dell,
and comes to terms with Angela, who, as Jes comes to realize, is less
than perfect on the inside.

As in her earlier books, Friesen provides the central adolescent
character with access to an adult who is capable of assisting the teen
in gaining self insights. In Losing Forever, that adult is Sam’s
mother, Amber, whose own long friendship with Jes’s mother changed
with the divorce and is changing yet again with the remarriage. Highly
recommended.