Digital List Price: | $9.99 |
Kindle Price: | $7.99 Save $2.00 (20%) |
Sold by: | Amazon.com Services LLC |
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Most Precious Blood Kindle Edition
After Val skips one Sunday dinner with her cousin Michelle’s family, everything changes. Val and Michelle’s fathers aren’t getting along, and she just wanted to avoid the tension that she knew would be on the menu. Val’s mom died of cancer two years ago, and now her father’s love and her mother’s memory are all she has.
But Michelle can’t let it go, and in her anger she drops a bombshell: “You’re not really family. You don’t really count.” Is it true? How come no one—not her teachers, not her classmates, not their parents—seems surprised? Other kids at school are adopted; it’s not a secret. So why hasn’t anyone told Val?
Slowly Val starts to see that things are different for her. Other kids don’t have bodyguards or a dad who gives them whatever they want with his piles of money. Up till now, Val has repaid her father’s love by being the obedient daughter he expects, but now she needs something else: She needs the truth.
- Reading age12 - 16 years
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOpen Road Media Teen & Tween
- Publication dateJanuary 6, 2015
Popular titles by this author
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B00PTIMX6W
- Publisher : Open Road Media Teen & Tween (January 6, 2015)
- Publication date : January 6, 2015
- Language : English
- File size : 1622 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Not Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 168 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,164,830 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
SUSAN BETH PFEFFER is the author of many books for teens, including Life As We Knew It and the bestselling novel The Year Without Michael. She lives in Middletown, New York.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top review from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Two years after her mother's death, Val Castaldi is in for a surprise. Her cousin, Michelle, drops a bomb on her in the middle of an argument at school: Val is adopted. Val refuses to believe the story, but the girls at her school begin to gossip. Rick Castaldi, rumored to be a Family man, scares most of the town - a little malicious gossip at the expense of his daughter seems to spread like long-suppressed wildfire. One rumor says she was bought, another that her father killed someone to steal their baby. Val needs to find out the truth for herself and finds that, despite her certainty that her father is just a respectable business man, she's almost too afraid of him to ask the questions. When she finally does, the truth is only the beginning of what she needs to learn in order to come to terms with her life and her family.
The story is one that a lot of kids can relate to, on some level, especially those who've been adopted and found out about it years later. The confusion and the questions about where you're from and why your parents kept it from you, and the feeling of being alone and lied to, those are all things a lot of people can understand. The rest - the mob, the bodyguard, Val's sense of entitlement, etc - is pure fiction to the average adoptee.
The problem, for me, is the writing. Val is one of the least sympathetic characters I've come across in a long time, expecting everyone to give her what she wants (because they always have) when she wants it. She's so involved in her own drama that she fails to see that her best friend, Kit, is in pain and might need some comfort - which Val would probably be incapable of providing, anyway. Kit's mother, an alcoholic, has gone on a rampage, tearing apart the house, and been taken away to a treatment center and Val's response is this: "Val thought about the real reason why she'd come over, to tell Kit everything her father had told her the day before. But she knew she'd have to get Kit's business out of the way first, so they could both concentrate on everything that was happening in Val's life." That Kit eventually calls Val on this behavior would seem like a great moment, but it's weird instead, and the reader has no idea if the two have just ended the friendship they've shared for sixteen years or started a real one.
Val's father, Rick, is a member of a mob family and acts like a don, forcing Val to have a bodyguard at all times, ordering everyone around all the time and scaring people in the process. Val, despite sixteen years worth of evidence, seems to be oblivious to the probability that he's a criminal. This just rings false. Lastly, the convoluted story about Val's adoption was really poorly done. It seemed to involve a handful of inter-related mob families and a death, but it was entirely unnecessary. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why Pfeffer felt the need to write a story about Val's adoption that was so complicated that it sounded ridiculous, made more ridiculous by the fact that Val seemed to follow Rick's telling of it, and her birth mother's later additions, without blinking and without question. By the time the author began to wrap up the story and attempt to redeem Val a bit, I was too frustrated to care.
- AnnaLovesBooks
Reviewed in the United States on May 14, 2009
Two years after her mother's death, Val Castaldi is in for a surprise. Her cousin, Michelle, drops a bomb on her in the middle of an argument at school: Val is adopted. Val refuses to believe the story, but the girls at her school begin to gossip. Rick Castaldi, rumored to be a Family man, scares most of the town - a little malicious gossip at the expense of his daughter seems to spread like long-suppressed wildfire. One rumor says she was bought, another that her father killed someone to steal their baby. Val needs to find out the truth for herself and finds that, despite her certainty that her father is just a respectable business man, she's almost too afraid of him to ask the questions. When she finally does, the truth is only the beginning of what she needs to learn in order to come to terms with her life and her family.
The story is one that a lot of kids can relate to, on some level, especially those who've been adopted and found out about it years later. The confusion and the questions about where you're from and why your parents kept it from you, and the feeling of being alone and lied to, those are all things a lot of people can understand. The rest - the mob, the bodyguard, Val's sense of entitlement, etc - is pure fiction to the average adoptee.
The problem, for me, is the writing. Val is one of the least sympathetic characters I've come across in a long time, expecting everyone to give her what she wants (because they always have) when she wants it. She's so involved in her own drama that she fails to see that her best friend, Kit, is in pain and might need some comfort - which Val would probably be incapable of providing, anyway. Kit's mother, an alcoholic, has gone on a rampage, tearing apart the house, and been taken away to a treatment center and Val's response is this: "Val thought about the real reason why she'd come over, to tell Kit everything her father had told her the day before. But she knew she'd have to get Kit's business out of the way first, so they could both concentrate on everything that was happening in Val's life." That Kit eventually calls Val on this behavior would seem like a great moment, but it's weird instead, and the reader has no idea if the two have just ended the friendship they've shared for sixteen years or started a real one.
Val's father, Rick, is a member of a mob family and acts like a don, forcing Val to have a bodyguard at all times, ordering everyone around all the time and scaring people in the process. Val, despite sixteen years worth of evidence, seems to be oblivious to the probability that he's a criminal. This just rings false. Lastly, the convoluted story about Val's adoption was really poorly done. It seemed to involve a handful of inter-related mob families and a death, but it was entirely unnecessary. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why Pfeffer felt the need to write a story about Val's adoption that was so complicated that it sounded ridiculous, made more ridiculous by the fact that Val seemed to follow Rick's telling of it, and her birth mother's later additions, without blinking and without question. By the time the author began to wrap up the story and attempt to redeem Val a bit, I was too frustrated to care.
- AnnaLovesBooks