Sensitive

Thirteen year old SJ (formerly Samantha) has just moved to a new town, a place where no one knows her shameful secret and she has a chance to start again. Maybe here in Kingston, she can be cool, and pretty, and carefree? Things begin well: SJ makes a new friend, Livvy, and a cute boy is paying attention to her. But her secret can't stay hidden forever...

SJ's shameful secret is her skin. Like Webster herself, SJ has terrible eczema which flares up unpredictably, and also severe allergies, not all of which have been identified. She reacts to grass, to the flowers the class dissects in science, to eggs, and who knows what else. Her worried mother puts her on an exclusion diet which eliminates almost every food, but SJ can't stop scratching, and she's tortured by the thought that people might guess that under her clothes, her skin is a red, painful, itchy mess. And what if the cute boy wants to kiss her? He'll be repulsed!

Sensitive draws heavily on Webster's own experiences; she almost died (twice) as a result of her conditions. Some of the strategies in the story seemed outdated to me, and it was hard to believe that a contemporary family (especially with a librarian for a mother) who avoid Dr Google so completely. My heart really went out to SJ and her family (and by extension, to Webster herself), and of course anything that makes you different, and especially look different, is all the more agonising at thirteen. Sensitive would be such a useful, compassionate book to give any child or adolescent suffering from skin complaints