Dara Palmer's Major Drama

by Emma Shevah

Eleven-year-old Dara is a born actress, or so she thinks, but when she doesn't get any role at all in the school production, she begins to think it may be because she doesn't look like the other girls in her class. She was adopted as a baby from Cambodia. So irrepressible Dara comes up with a plan and is determined to change not just the school, but the world too. A beautifully written, warm and funny tale for girls aged 8-12, from the critically acclaimed author of Dream On, Amber.

Genres: Middle Grade, Adoption, Realistic Fiction, Family, Humor, Friendship, Fiction

295 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

Emma Shevah is half-Irish and half-Thai. She was born and raised in London but has lived in Australia, Japan, India and Jerusalem. She now lives in London with her family and works far too much. Emma has been a fire-juggler, restaurant manager, copy writer, vegetarian take away server, CV advisor, features writer and blogger, and is currently a freewheeling philosopher and cosmic English-teaching novelist and mystic.

Reviews

[Rabiah · Rating 4 out of 5]

NOTE: The actual title for this book is DARA PALMER’S MAJOR DRAMA

Originally posted at: http://iliveforreading.blogspot.com/2...

Dara Palmer’s Major Drama has got to be one of the cutest books EVER. I’m not just talking about the story either. The actual format and illustrations bordering the writing, and some of the typography as well–this was LITERALLY a bundle of joy. This was another book in the huge stack that Pansing sent for review, and I hadn’t heard of it before I received it. I’m so glad I got the chance to read it because it’s absolutely fabulous, you guys. For an acting geek like me (oh, the theatre! The lights, the dialogue, the stage!), this was a perfect fit. Why? Well why don’t we take a little trip down memory lane... (my memory, that is)

6TH GRADE (the Philippines): On a whim, I decided to audition for a play. I got into not one, but TWO plays that year. One was a musical and the other was a piece that I got to fly to New Delhi in India to perform as part of an international schools theatre program (ISTA). From this point on, theatre was always going to be in my life.

7TH GRADE (Canada): I believe this was the first time the older grades (7-11) got to put on a production. 12 Angry Men, to be exact. I got the role of foreman and got special mention since I was the youngest person to get a “larger” role. Cool, huh?

8TH GRADE (still Canada): Because of the success of the previous year, yet another play was put on: Lord of the Flies–an all-female cast. This time, for me, there was no need to audition. The role of Piggy went to me, straight away. I was thrilled because it was the 3rd biggest role in the play and the only other people with really big roles were in the 11th or 12th grade. Yay me!

9TH GRADE (Singapore): Feeling confident that I would be getting a part, I auditioned with all I got. Or at least, that’s what I thought. End result? Didn’t get in. And I wouldn’t get into another play until grade 11.

So, you see? Dara and I are kindred spirits. Like Dara, I came to realise that just because I was great and got all the parts before didn’t mean I would always. I learned that there was so much more to acting like she does in the book.

Another reason why this was such an amazing book was that it was about a girl who looks different from the rest of her family. I know quite a few people who have been adopted, and I’m sad that there are not many books out there about adopted children, which needs to change, because it’s important that children can see themselves in the books they read, especially at a young age. This book is such a blessing, because through Dara’s character, many of the questions and emotions that adopted children have about themselves comes up, like how they’re set apart from their family, how they’re curious about their past but may never find out who exactly their real parents are, and so on. It’s quite a challenging topic, but it’s definitely a necessary one to address.

Featuring a super dramatic (and super adorable) heroine, Dara Palmer’s Major Drama is a wonderful story I’m sure readers of all ages will enjoy. Touching upon adoption, rejection, and taking charge of your life, Emma Shevah’s latest book, complete with cute illustrations by Helen Crawford-White, is both hilarious and moving. Don’t hesitate to pick this one up!

▪ ▪ ▪ Thank you so much to Sasha at Pansing for sending me a copy for review! ▪ ▪ ▪

[Becky Loader · Rating 2 out of 5]

OK, I get it. But, when did it become acceptable for little kids to be smart mouths to adults all the time? I get very tired of the portrayal in media (tv, movies, books, etc.) that kids have to be scoring on people all the time. Whatever happened to being respectful and polite? Yes, there are major issues here, but really? Grow up nicely.

[~just one hopeless romantic~ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book wasn’t quite in my genre. It didn’t have a nice ending and it didn’t have a good plot. I thought that I would like this book because it was by Emma Shevah, and I liked her books. However, the story was cute, and I loved the little drawings. This book didn’t actually have any drama so I think this story was kinda not good… but good. Anyways, this book was horrible but I really enjoyed it. 😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😕😕😕😕😕😕😕😕🥸🥸🥸🥸🤩🤩🤩🤩🥰🥰🥰😍😍😍😘😘😘😗😝😝😛😛😋😋😚😙😙😜😎😩😩🙁😒😞😁😆☺️😗😝🤓😏😕

[Tina Dalton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dara Palmer is adramaqueen and she adores that about herself. She and her best friend are certain they will get the leads in the school's upcoming production of "The Sound of Music". When Dara doesn't get any speaking parts whatsoever, she starts to take a closer look at herself as an actress, which leads to a journey of self exploration about her life as a Cambodian child adopted by a white British family. Dara is hilarious. The writing in this book is funny and such a great voice for a fifth grader. I loved this book.

[Coco · Rating 2 out of 5]

What I did like:
-Totally cover buy.
-It is a nice, cute, feel-good middle grade book about a flamboyant young cambodian girl adopted (as a toddler) by a white british family and her conflicts with: her cultural identity, her history that she does not quiet remember and her big dreams for the future as a Hollywood celebrity, her friends, her adopted sister Georgia and her adopting family, etc. The Major Drama it starts when Dara does not get the lead rol in her school play, or any role at all and she starts to note that she looks different than the other kids, her family and the others in her community.

What I didn´t like:
It is not, like the sinopsis misleads to believe, about discrimination (except for a little bratty kid who gets scolded once and that´s it), the lack of representation and opportunities of ethnic minorities in western media entertaintment industries and ¨whitewashing¨. In the sinopsis and in the firsts chapters it seems to go there, but no, it totally glasses over the matter. Since now, in 2018, it´s an open but controversial discussion and I know this book is from 2015 I find it weird but I thought it was an own-voice early attempt to bring up the topic to the youngest.
The play at school is The Sound of Music, so it is first assumed and pointed by Dara´s father that she did not got the lead part for the practical fact that Maria is an austrian nun with pale skin. It seems problematic but it´s just to lead Dara to believe for a moment that she didn´t have the rol because she´s cambodian and started to notes that she´s different to the majority of her western peers and that in Hollywood there´s not celebrities that looks like her. It´s promptly stablish that she actually didn´t get any role because watching a lot of TV and mimicking faces doesn´t make you talented and that she actually has to work harder (like, duh) and if she were talented she could have a part because in school plays ethnics doesn´t matter (ok, great).
Now,the book make it sound as if in westen society there´s not that much of ethnic people wanting parts in westen productions or wanting to produce their own stories, it doesn´t adress the huge eastern entertainment media and it totally fails to mention the fact that when it happens to be parts and productions for and about ethnic minorities the lead roles goes to white actors and the story gets modify to fit in western culture, instead it makes it look like that only happens for a merit matter.
I also find a little disturbing that the drama teacher was giving parts in the school play only to the kids that went to her private drama classes for which she charges. I get that Dara was really bad and she need it the lessons and learn the hard work of acting, but, shouldn´t the school being the one providing that? Why there´s a play and rehearsals if there´s not drama classes?

[Erica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fans of The Princess Diaries are likely to be so inured to the chatty conversational confessions of character flaws that Dara's first-person voice will not grate on them as much as the average reader. That'd be good, because then they will be open to hearing her slow-to-wake perspective of a Cambodian girl adopted into a British family, and her slow evolution from celebrity-actor-Hollywood-fan-girl to actual actor, and her slowly growing consciousness of other people, outside of her nearly constant self-absorbed state of mind.

Because the main character grows a bit, and self-consciously, self-centeredly describes every tiny step she makes to a more widely conscious person, readers like her may be able to follow along without getting disgusted and turned off in the initial chapters. So, hand this to readers who are energetic, effervescent, dramatic, melodramatic, adopted & a different skin-color or ethnicity from their adoptive parents, confident despite mediocre academic performance, and mercurial.

However, I can't recommend the audiobook read by Avita Jay. Although in general her voice is clear and interesting, she turns on the melodrama with squeals, whines, and shouts a bit too much, not realizing that the sound recording amplifies those high-register sounds making them especially grating. Jay's voicing of Dara's various sound effects - to indicate a sort of throat-clearing, vomiting feeling - are effective, and kids will relate to them, if they can get past the squeals of the first several chapters. Completely distracting and confusing, however, is Avita Jay's oddly erratic lisp; she pronounces leading "s"s (but not other "s"s) as hard "th"s. In other words, the sentence "So, she slept..." sounds like "Though she slept..." because only the leading "s" has a lisp. It happens so frequently, you would think a listener could get used to it, and yet it was a surprise each time.

Poor development of side-characters is fitting with the self-absorbed nature of the main character, although her personal growth might have been better illustrated by a gradual reveal of side-characters' details. Also, Dara's imagined interactions with Hollywood actors include people in her imagination knowing more than Dara actually knows, a virtual impossibility.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

British girl Dara loves nothing more than being the center of attention, and has her sights set on Hollywood. When she gets no part in the school musical, however, she has to rethink everything. Did she not get the part because she was adopted from Cambodia, so doesn't look like Maria von Trapp? Or was there another reason? She won't accept that she's a terrible actress, so she just can't figure it out. In the meantime, there are other dramas going on. She and her younger sister Georgia (adopted from Russia) loathe each other, and have to share a room, so Dara does all she can to make Georgia miserable. Then at school, Dara's best friend Lacey is resentful whenever Dara does something without her, to the point at which Dara is rethinking what a best friend is. Then there's Cambodia. She says she doesn't think about it, but she does. She wonders about her past, and about why she never sees any Cambodian faces in movies or advertising. When the chance comes up either to go to Cambodia or to take drama lessons, she has a tough choice to make.

A lot of this drove me nuts, probably deliberately--the pointless doodles on every page, Dara's ridiculous vocalizations, the changes in font size--but it does mimic the urgency of kids' feelings. Dara was difficult to like for quite a while, though she did warn readers in a prologue about that, and becoming more thoughtful and mindful does make her much nicer. What I liked about this was having representation of someone in Dara's position, and all the myriad thoughts that run through her mind. She really does think about it a lot, and her family is really helpful as Dara tries to figure out what's really important to her. I think a lot of kids will love seeing themselves in this, and others will learn a lot about what it might feel like for someone adopted from another country, especially if they are of a different ethnicity. And the older brother, Felix, was just amazing--I wish I'd had a brother like that! I did find the ending unbelievable, but overall I really liked this.

[Mary Van Winkle · Rating 5 out of 5]

What started off as a very cute middle grade book turned into a very thoughtful book about cultural identity, family relationships and realizing that yes, you are probably in the wrong. I discovered Dara Palmer's Major Drama about a month after lamenting that there was no contemporary fictional representation of Cambodian characters in books (I'm half Cambodian so I was really searching).

Dara's whole drama kicks off when she doesn't get the role of Maria in her school's Sound of Music production. She thinks she deserves it because she and her toxic friend Lacey have talked themselves into thinking that because they can pantomime faces, they are the best actresses in school. I liked that Dara is completely full of herself and selfish but you still like her anyway and that she was open to change and slowly did. I didn't like that after realizing Lacey was a horrible, unsupportive friend, she's still in the picture at the end. I don't think someone like her would change and I would've been much more satisfied if she and Dara had drifted apart completely.

The bigger issue is Dara feeling like she's the odd-girl-out in her white family because she's so dark and obviously different in looks and personality. She ignores her feelings about being Cambodian and wanting to learn more because she's scared she'll upset her parents and herself. She also admits to a very relatable feeling: she's Cambodian but she's not Cambodian. She's English. I've gotten that feeling my entire life. I'm happy that she excepted herself and was learning more about her culture at the end.

I'm also glad she realized she wasn't acting and decided to go to classes. As I realized there are missing Cambodian characters in books, she realized they are missing on screen. A 10/11 year old writing a musical about her life? I know its fictional but that's brilliant. This book is so much more than what the jacket description leads you to believe and you thinknits going to be silly and it is a bit but its better than some adults books I've read this year.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Right from the get-go, Dara has one of the most unique voices I have ever read in a chapter book for kids. It is going to put some people off, especially adults. She's arrogant, judgmental, and, you guessed it, over-the-top dramatic. She has no emotion or experience that is not 10 times the usual size. She is also hilarious. When her sister puts her favorite sparkly skirt on the roof, she cuts off her favorite stuffed animal's head. Dara is understandably convinced that she is destined to become a star. Specifically, she want to become a movie star and marry the insipid blonde star of her favorite show. In her spare time, she writes mental movie scripts of their life together. Dara, however, has no real grasp of reality, and has to learn that understanding the world and the people around her is an essential component of good acting. As Dara comes into her own as an actress, she reevaluates her relationships with friends and family, understanding them from others' perspectives. Dara is also adopted from Cambodia. The book is thoroughly-researched, and the true magic of Dara Palmer is that understanding her family and friends means that she can also begin to understand herself. Formerly locked in her own technicolor world, she incorporates shades of emotion and identity that she would formerly have shoved to the side. Dara's relationship with her sister, adopted from Russia and her long-term nemesis, is particularly poignant. Dara had long assumed that she was the victim in their ongoing feud, and comes to realize that she has perpetrated most of their discord, and that in fact, her sister desperately needs her for an ally. I may be crying just thinking about it. The kids I've handed this book to have loved it as much as I did. Understated introverts will identify with Dara's sister while all the drama queens of the world will love and learn from Dara. Everybody in between, just sit back and enjoy!

[Georgie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh my gosh, is this a great book. I read it two weeks ago, and wrote to Emma Shevah to tell her how much I loved it. This is a well-told story, and I really, really liked the characters. The one thing I did not care for personally, was the changing of font-types used throughout the book. But then I remembered that the book is written for kids, not for grown-ups, and the most popular books checked out of my school library are the ones with the goofy fonts - the kids love them.

So, I decided to push on an read for the story. I loved it. I loved the fact that Dara came to realizations about herself, her family, her place in the world and that she changed and grew as a person.

Emma Shevah did an outstanding job showing international adoption, both from the point of view of the adoptee and the adoptive parents and siblings. I am really looking foward to books from Ms. Shevah - I think she is going to be very important in the world of children's literature.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a bit to get into the book in part because Dara is kind of annoying at the beginning. Fortunately, she changes and matures through the story (although still a little annoying with her adulation of American movie actor). We get a little of everything as we get to know Dara: her obsession with acting, sibling rivalry, friendship, racism, adoption. There aren't a lot of books about adoption from the child's point of view. The story begins to focus as Dara begins to more seriously ponder what adoption means for her and her life. Lots of doodles.

[Sasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted rio love this so badly, but out just didn't do it for me. Maybe Dara's selfishness and silliness and even spitefulness hit a little too close to home. I found her highly unlikable and didn't root for her at all. I really wanted her to not get any major parts, because that would have been more believable to me. But she could have been an excellent stage manager and ready to do community theater next year.
Why did she get to be an audience member for the Sound of Music, shouldn't she have been running it?
I'm glad she took lessons in Khmer though.

[Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was enjoyable, although I felt like Dara didn’t change enough to have me rooting for her. The part where she understands her sister’s point of view was good but when Georgia wanted to visit her old orphanage, Dara pretended to agree but really thought ‘of course not’ (paraphrasing). Maybe this is more realistic than having her completely change, I don’t know. Other than that, I liked that the teacher turned out to be nice and I appreciated the improv group scenes. Wasn’t quite my book, but it is still good.

[Kristen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this more than I expected to. It's like a middle grade Bridget Jones about a girl who is adopted and gets more self awareness by the end than Bridget ever had. Dara is whiny and overly dramatic and can be irritating, but I still found her funny, and there are lots of really moving bits in here about adoption and identity. I think kids who are interested in drama, or who want to read stories about adoption, would enjoy this one.

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book.A story of a girl who struggles to leave her old,orphaned life in Cambodia behind, turns to theater to fix her problems.But when she doesnt get her favorite character because she doesnt have fair skin this greatly impacts what Dara thinks of herself.Beyond the Drama Dara learns that shes beautiful just the way she is,and that family isnt always made with DNA sometimes its made with pure LOVE.

[Sara-Zoe Patterson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was pretty good. You've plenty of growth of character and character change, and recognizing when other kids aren't being a good friend and what that means, and recognizing your own failings and acting to change them even when it's hard. And international / inter-racial adoption. It's all wrapped up in this pop-light package and writing which is def grating to me but I get it.

[Kathy Broadnax · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very enjoyable story of being different because you are adopted, and not letting that stop your dreams. stepping into someone elses shoes so you see what they are like. writing a musical about all of it. Dara ( adopted from Cambodia), Georgia (adopted from Russia) and Felix biological son of the Palmers.

Excellent!

[Miss Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

A young English girl is very upset she doesn't get a part in the school play when she thinks she's an amazing actress. What follows is a journey of self discovery of her organs (she's adopted from Cambodia) and the real reasons she didn't get the part. love the supportive family and the honest adoption emotions. upper elementary

[Tiff · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first this book was way too high-strung for me (ha, really? me being quite high-strung in general); then just plain ol' fell in love with the book. Dara undegoes growing pains but such good and sweet ones. I am so proud of her! Bonus points as a diversity book. Bravo Shevah, I'll be darned.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 really - I've got no complaints other than this being a book about a normal person with normal people problems. And the fact that it's like if an 11-yo came up to you and told you their ENTIRE LIFE STORY without pausing for breath in the most melodramatic of ways. But that's its style really.

[Cayli · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like this book because of the main character she was really nice to everyone but inside deep inside she wanted to be the star of the show and she would never get the roll everybody else would and you could tell that she was really upset about it.

[Donna Dobihal Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

With a protagonist who can be as annoying as she is likeable, this delightful, quick read touches on some serious topics with sensitivity and humor. Lots of fun illustrations too, which will draw reluctant readers in. Highly recommended. Great choice for a book club.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5 stars

[Brenda Kahn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't enjoy this one as much as Dream On, Amber.

[maddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so dramatic I love it

[Becky · Rating 2 out of 5]

Listened to audiobook with the girls. We loved a different book by this author, but found Dara, the main character of this book, to be mean and bratty which kind of ruined the story.

[Seawood · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review to follow

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book whose protagonist is a Cambodian adoptee living in the UK. The author does a good job of making this young girls perspective and transformation believable.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read with my 10 year old daughter and we both loved it. Laughed, cried and enjoyed it immensely.

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a great child's book. Talks about being adopted, being different, etc. Great book to give to a child or read yourself.