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Why Me?
Requiring a kidney transplant or dialysis for the rest of her life, Rachel, a young girl stricken with kidney disease, begins her search for a donor and discovers that she was adopted. Original.
184 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
1 person is currently reading
74 people want to read
About the author
Deborah Kent
178Ìýbooks21ÌýfollowersDeborah Kent was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby Little Falls. She graduated from Oberlin College and received a master's degree from Smith College School for Social Work. For four years, she was a social worker at University Settlement House on New York's Lower East Side. In 1975, Ms. Kent moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where she wrote her first young-adult novel, Belonging. In San Miguel, Ms. Kent helped to found the Centro de Crecimiento, a school for children with disabilities. Ms. Kent is the author of numerous young-adult novels and nonfiction titles for children. She lives in Chicago with her husband, children's author R. Conrad Stein, and their daughter, Janna.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
February 10, 2023
Such a good read, I remember reading it when I was younger, Rachel has kidney problems and needs dialysis.
May 16, 2019
I read the book Why Me? by Deborah Kent. The book is about a teenage girl named Rachel, she loves ballet, her best friend is Lici, and she is adopted . One day Rachel was in ballet class, she started her dance and by the middle she got really tired and really laggy, her feet felt heavy and she had to stop! After the whole dance was over Miss Panova, the Ballet teacher, had all the girls stand in a line, she picked out some of the girls that weren't trying hard enough and yelled at them, Rachel was in that group.
When her mom came to pick her up, Rachel told her how bad she felt, her mom took her to the hospital to see what was wrong. She had a kidney problem so she got put on dialysis, she had to learn how to put a new bag on her dialysis machine. She could get a kidney transplant but she needs her biological family, so she gets put on a waiting list for transplants until they find her family.
I like how she acts like to having something new join the family. One other thing is how Rachel puts time into her day to do all of her training or putting bags on, she had to get used to it and put it in her schedule.
My favorite part was when she came home from school and wanted something to eat, she can only eat noodles so everyday her after school snack is noodles, she wants to break the rules once so she gets the ice-cream out and scoops a bowl of ice-cream and the phone rings, she thinks it will be the nurse or her mom to yell at her for breaking the rules but it was only the New York Child Care Center
I really liked this book because I want to be a nurse when I get older. Why Me? Would be a reading level that you could read in 6th or 7th grade because it is easy and you can learn a lot about kidney things and somethings on how people have to get used to it.
When her mom came to pick her up, Rachel told her how bad she felt, her mom took her to the hospital to see what was wrong. She had a kidney problem so she got put on dialysis, she had to learn how to put a new bag on her dialysis machine. She could get a kidney transplant but she needs her biological family, so she gets put on a waiting list for transplants until they find her family.
I like how she acts like to having something new join the family. One other thing is how Rachel puts time into her day to do all of her training or putting bags on, she had to get used to it and put it in her schedule.
My favorite part was when she came home from school and wanted something to eat, she can only eat noodles so everyday her after school snack is noodles, she wants to break the rules once so she gets the ice-cream out and scoops a bowl of ice-cream and the phone rings, she thinks it will be the nurse or her mom to yell at her for breaking the rules but it was only the New York Child Care Center
I really liked this book because I want to be a nurse when I get older. Why Me? Would be a reading level that you could read in 6th or 7th grade because it is easy and you can learn a lot about kidney things and somethings on how people have to get used to it.
April 16, 2021
I start this book in seventh grade and then switched schools long before I ever finished. Back then I never liked to read. It's something I've come to love late in life. I decided to track this book down and read the whole thing. I'm very glad I did. I absolutely loved it. The story is about rachel who is happy and healthy until one day she isn't. It's all about her journey through kidney failure and dialysis and her hopes for a transplant. Good for kids from fifth grade on. But even though I'm 39 I still very much enjoyed finally knowing how it ended.
November 25, 2016
I remembered the time back in the first week of school, when our phys ed teacher, Ms. Lundy, came out with the statement that, “True health is to live day to day without ever thinking about your body.� But now I understood what Ms. Lundy has been talking about.
Years back, title of this book caught my attention many times when I skimmed through the various book titles in my school library and one day I finally decided to give Why Me a read. One of the best decisions I had taken then. The story of Rachel Whitaker stuck with me for a long time and years after I first read it, I thought of reading it again to see if I find it as amazing as I found it then, and honestly, I love it even more now.
The story is about a simple thirteen year old girl, Rachel Whitaker, who was adopted when she was little. But that’s not what the story is completely about. Unfortunately she gets to know that both her kidneys have failed and, barring the other options she had, the only way she could ever get back to her normal routine (i.e. a life without dialysis) is by a transplant from a blood relative. That’s when everything changes for her: they look for her mother.
Melanie passed me a handful of pictures, and I rippled through them until I stared into my own face. There was last September’s me, smiling quietly as if I had some private joke. I searched in vain for some hint of trouble, some foreboding of the calamity that lay in wait for me only weeks after that shot was taken.
Everything in the book, from the character’s struggles to accept the reality while coping with and adjusting to the abrupt changes in her life to her curious and conflicting thoughts, is portrayed very well- very true and realistic in a very simply way. She gives up on what she loves which is ballet that struck her the most while enduring dialysis which seemed to be the most difficult to get adjusted to.
“What if she’s somebody glamorous, like a movie star or a great dancer? Maybe someday she’ll find you and take you to Hollywood.�
The book talks about looking for her real mother. Rachel is always curious about her mother’s identity and also makes up stories about her real mother. It builds the suspense in the book-whether she finds her mother or not- and makes the reader turn the pages until they get the answers to her questions. In my case, I felt like jumping to the last page to know what happens.
Someone would cast Phoebe a long, hard look and ask, “Who do you think she takes after?� And it would hit me with a little jolt that, as long as I lived, nobody was ever going to ask that question about me.
My favourite thing about this book is that- which may come as a surprise to many- it doesn’t have romance. I have realised that romance is one factor that most people look for in a story and are more easily attracted to and which also in a way makes it more interesting than without it. But here even without a romantic plot, the author tells us the meaning of love and belonging (in Rachel's case) even though she was adopted. Love doesn’t always have to be romantic to be good. In Rachel’s life, love is her (foster) family’s affection, care, concern, protectiveness towards her and their support during crisis, her friend’s support and motivation. There are times when no one really knows how she feels and aren’t able to put themselves in her shoes, she sulks and curses her fate, and almost gives up, and it is the people in her life, including the new people she meets, who encourage and help bringing her back on track whenever she stumbles. It’s really sweet.
For years I had trained my body to obey me. I could turn my legs out from the hip, I could do a perfect split, and rise gracefully on my toes. But sometimes lately I wondered if my body was turning against me. I was helpless, in the clutches of an enemy I couldn’t name.
I like Rachel’s dry sarcasm no matter how sad it is. It’s a good book to know how someone feels when they have to go through such a situation. But the story is not entirely serious and so refreshing and funny at times that one can’t help laughing. Along with all that I have mentioned, it is still a story of a normal and confused teenager who we can all relate to.
The only problem is that at the beginning, the pace of the story is a little slow and then as we move forward, it quickens so abruptly that we don’t realise when so much time has passed in the book until the narrator mentions it themselves.
I have never read such a simple book as amazing as Why Me. I don’t think anyone really gets to read a book like this these days. Maybe it was because of the fact that it was published in 1992 but I would still believe that the book is one in a million. What saddens me the most is that it is a really obscure book, something that isn’t easily available. There is no e-book available and it is quite expensive online (and I want it badly), I think they stopped printing it a long time back. But I would recommend it to anyone who is bored with the usual YA stories and wants to read something different for a change.
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November 13, 2017
this was one of the books I remember from when I was a kid , I really liked it
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 13, 2015
This review is also available on my blog, .
This was a book I picked up for free at a book swap. The plot - about a medical and identity crisis rolled together - appealed to me, and I hoped it would be as good as it sounded. The short version of this review: it was.
Poor Rachel's life becomes a living hell when she suffers kidney failure and goes on dialysis. She quits ballet, the love of her life, and feels sluggish and snappy. She deals with her body's "betrayal" (as she puts it) very realistically, with tears and anger. She grows over the course of the book as she realizes that she must accept the fact that her life will never be the same. She also must come to grips with her birth mother's identity and reason for giving her up. This struggle also is extremely realistic, and I thought it was very well done.
The only flaw I can find with the book is its pacing: apparently it spans about a year of Rachel's life, starting with when her kidneys fail, but it doesn't feel like it. In fact, time seems to pass rather sporadically with detailed scenes intermingled with statements to the effect of "time passed." The passage of time is a recurring theme throughout the book, as the process of finding Rachel's birth mother takes a really long time. However, this didn't really work for me as sufficient proof: from Rachel's character growth, you would think that only a few months at most have passed.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in what it's like to live after a kidney failure: the food restrictions, the dialysis, the sluggishness, etc. It's also a great story about identity and the difference between biological and adoptive family. It's perfectly fine for younger readers, so you can be comfortable handing this book to anyone whose reading comprehension is up to it. I'm very glad I found this little treasure; it gave me an up-close view of what it's like to suffer kidney failure. I just hope it's the closest look I'll ever get!
This was a book I picked up for free at a book swap. The plot - about a medical and identity crisis rolled together - appealed to me, and I hoped it would be as good as it sounded. The short version of this review: it was.
Poor Rachel's life becomes a living hell when she suffers kidney failure and goes on dialysis. She quits ballet, the love of her life, and feels sluggish and snappy. She deals with her body's "betrayal" (as she puts it) very realistically, with tears and anger. She grows over the course of the book as she realizes that she must accept the fact that her life will never be the same. She also must come to grips with her birth mother's identity and reason for giving her up. This struggle also is extremely realistic, and I thought it was very well done.
The only flaw I can find with the book is its pacing: apparently it spans about a year of Rachel's life, starting with when her kidneys fail, but it doesn't feel like it. In fact, time seems to pass rather sporadically with detailed scenes intermingled with statements to the effect of "time passed." The passage of time is a recurring theme throughout the book, as the process of finding Rachel's birth mother takes a really long time. However, this didn't really work for me as sufficient proof: from Rachel's character growth, you would think that only a few months at most have passed.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in what it's like to live after a kidney failure: the food restrictions, the dialysis, the sluggishness, etc. It's also a great story about identity and the difference between biological and adoptive family. It's perfectly fine for younger readers, so you can be comfortable handing this book to anyone whose reading comprehension is up to it. I'm very glad I found this little treasure; it gave me an up-close view of what it's like to suffer kidney failure. I just hope it's the closest look I'll ever get!
December 28, 2020
I was obsessed with this book in fourth grade. My teacher had it in our classroom, and I must have read it three or four times over the course of the year during free reading period. At the end of the year we got to take books home. I really wanted this one, but someone else got to it before I could. Twenty years later this showed up in a box of books that belonged to my husband and his sister when they were kids, so of course I had to re-read it. It's not bad, as far as YA novels go, although there's not much depth for something as profound as a near-death experience and the discovery of a long-lost birth mother. I feel like young adult fiction has come a long way in the past couple of decades.
ETA December 2020: We had this in a box of books in our basement and recently realized that our now-almost-9-year-old is old enough to read the YA books so we pulled them out for him. He wasn't interested in this one because he thought it might be too scary, but I ended up re-reading it again. Ha!
ETA December 2020: We had this in a box of books in our basement and recently realized that our now-almost-9-year-old is old enough to read the YA books so we pulled them out for him. He wasn't interested in this one because he thought it might be too scary, but I ended up re-reading it again. Ha!
June 30, 2015
This is a middle-grade book, and an old one at that. however, I just feel that this is a very important book. Rachael, the main character, contracts kidney disease out of nowhere. There is a fair bit of suspense when she almost dies in the hospital, but she eventually gets well enough to go back home. She feels, though, that she will never get back to normal and that her life will never be the same. She deals with anger and a bit of depression, and goes through a lot of existential crises. She needs a new kidney in order to fully get back to feeling like herself. A relative would be her best option, however, she is adopted. The rest of the book is about her finding her mother and getting healed, but along the way she realizes what the whole experience has really shown her and that she's stronger now for what she's been through. I thought there were great underlying concepts of finding oneself and coming-of-age. All in all, a pretty good book.
December 23, 2012
A wonderful book about the struggles a child must face when dealing with a sudden-onset illness. Young adults can easily sympathize with the main character early on and then, by sharing her experiences, learn to understand what a friend, relation or even total stranger with an illness or disability is going through. As an adult I would highly recommend this book for any family coping with sudden, severe illnesses or even long-term disabilities. Adults should share the story with their young readers and talk about experiences, making sure to answer any questions that come along. Of course, anyone wanting a heartwarming story about pushing through hardship and finding out what the real meaning of family will enjoy this book as well.
January 22, 2013
A Story About Coping with Illness
I enjoyed this book, even though it was difficult to read at times, and though understandable and realistically portrayed, the main character's bitterness started to get to me after a while. That said it is an excellent book for those who might be facing similar events in their lives, and a good talking point between adults and younger family members as a way of approaching the same issues. On the other hand, there is also a warmth to the story that tugs are the reader's heart strings as the family in the story is brought together by all that occurs, and by facing their hardships together.
I enjoyed this book, even though it was difficult to read at times, and though understandable and realistically portrayed, the main character's bitterness started to get to me after a while. That said it is an excellent book for those who might be facing similar events in their lives, and a good talking point between adults and younger family members as a way of approaching the same issues. On the other hand, there is also a warmth to the story that tugs are the reader's heart strings as the family in the story is brought together by all that occurs, and by facing their hardships together.
December 3, 2015
ThiIn this novel, I got to learn and understand the implications of what it means to be adopted. I have read other novels in which children are not told the truth about they being adopted, and only when a medical conditions makes that necessary, it can really cause one to endure many emotional hardships.
July 25, 2014
it was a great book and i reccomend it
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