Cover of Abandon

Abandon

by Meg Cabot

2012 Molino 347 pages
Publication Date:
January 1st, 2012
Publisher:
Molino
ISBN-13:
9788427201873
ISBN-10:
8427201877
Pages:
347

Why Abandon Has Been Challenged

Critics of the novel have generally taken issue not with any single scene but with the overall shape of its central relationship, in which a teenage protagonist is drawn toward a much older, death-linked figure who exerts considerable control over her choices. See more ↓

Challenged or banned in 1 state across 2 school districts.

<h2>Overview</h2> <p>Meg Cabot's <em>Abandon</em> follows Pierce Oliviera, a teenager still reeling from an accident that left her clinically dead before she was revived. The experience has not faded quietly into memory; instead, it has left her suspended between two states of being, never quite settled back into ordinary life and never quite free of whatever she encountered on the other side.</p> <p>A move to a new town offers the promise of reinvention. A new school, new faces, and distance from the place where everything changed seem to give Pierce room to breathe. But the presence that has watched over — or perhaps laid claim to — her since her brush with death is not so easily outrun, resurfacing at the moments she least expects and, often, precisely when she needs rescue.</p> <p>What follows is a story of a girl caught between worlds: the ordinary one she is trying to rebuild and a shadowed realm of the dead that keeps drawing her back, embodied by a figure who is neither wholly comforting nor wholly safe.</p> <h2>A Modern Turn on an Old Myth</h2> <p><em>Abandon</em> launched a trilogy that reimagines the myth of Persephone's abduction into the underworld through a contemporary teenage lens, trading ancient Greece for a present-day setting while preserving the myth's central tension: a young woman's pull toward a powerful, death-adjacent figure who will not release his hold on her. The novel marked a notable departure for Cabot, whose earlier and best-known work leaned toward light contemporary comedy; here she works in a darker, gothic register more concerned with mortality, fate, and the uneasy line between devotion and possession.</p> <p>The book sits within a broader wave of mid-2000s and early-2010s young adult fiction that paired supernatural world-building with brooding romantic leads, a trend that drew both enthusiastic readerships and recurring scrutiny over what such stories modeled for teenage audiences. Critical and reader reception has often focused on how the Persephone framework is adapted — whether the retelling complicates or simply repackages the myth's original imbalance of power between a mortal girl and an immortal figure who controls her fate.</p> <h2>Why Abandon Has Been Challenged↰/h2>

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About Meg Cabot

Meg Cabot

Meg Cabot is a #1 New York Times bestselling author best known for The Princess Diaries series, which was adapted into two hit Disney films starring Anne Hathaway. Born in Bloomington, Indiana, she has published more than 80 novels spanning children's, young adult, and adult fiction, including the Mediator series and the 1-800-Where-R-U books that introduced Jessica Mastriani. Her work is cataloged here as banned or challenged across 3 states and 19 districts, largely over its candid handling of teenage romance and sexuality.

More about Meg Cabot →

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Banned in Schools

Banned or challenged in 1 state across 2 school districts.

Florida 2 districts