Sapphire the Great and the Meaning of Life

On the surface, this tale of a girl and her hamster is simple. A young person is allowed to find a pet, and she chooses a small, white, blue-eyed hamster, and she does her best to take care of the fuzzy little creature. But as the story progresses, and the reader begins to see other dimensions of Jeannie’s family life—her father has moved out, her mother is tired and has a new job, and the woman responsible for a car crash with her and her mother—and everything mixes together to create a dynamic tale of love, rivalry, mistrust, and hope.

Although the overall premise holds promise (apologies for the word play), the alternating perspectives of Jeannie and the hamster (Sapphire) create a somewhat disconcerting landscape. Sapphire is an incredibly self-aware creature, though one who, among her existential diatribes, can seem to do nothing but bite the hand that literally feeds her. And Jeannie is discontent with her home life, yells a lot of the time, and doesn’t seem to learn from her mistakes.

The narrative is very involved, considering the short page count. Jeannie is not simply dealing with her father leaving, but the fact that her father has left for the love of another man (the father of one of her brother’s friends). And on top of this, her mother’s car accident has led to a friendship with Anna Conda, a trans woman whose own history problematically mirrors that of Jeannie’s discovery that her hamster is female, not male. The conflation of these narrative components is troubling, and teachers/librarians should take note.

In the end, the surface-level components of the novel are intriguing, but the more involved components, such as Anna’s gender identity and Jeannie’s father’s sexuality, are not given enough attention to truly help young readers find a way of connecting with the more nuanced and complex elements of the novel.