book review

Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt.  This book always takes me back to fifth grade (I’m pretty sure), and reading it with Susan and talking about how we loved the name Winnie.  I loved this book back then, and I have to say it holds up pretty well.  I reread this book this summer after hearing some songs from the musical version that came up on my Spotify playlists.  The music was really fun and the girls were asking me tons of questions about what was happening in the show, so I thought a reread was a good idea.  The book is a nice story, with a child narrator (always my favorite), about immortality and family.  Winnie is the main character, who is living a boring, secluded life.  She meets the Tucks by accident, and is drawn into a grand and dangerous adventure.  She has to make some big, romantic decisions that were fascinating to my 5th grade mind, but a little creepy with my grown-up perspective.

Wonder by R.J. Palacio.  My friend Sara lent me this book, so I finally got to read it.  I’ve been wanting to for a long time.  It is another book that jumps between different points-of-view, so that was fun.  I really like books that do that.  It also has child narrators, so another plus in my book.  I think the reason I liked this book, as a middle school teacher, is that it really shows how everyone has their own perspective on problems, and that people shouldn’t just assume they know the truth of a situation.  The obvious main story is that of Auggie, who is a boy with severe facial deformities, and how he navigates going to school for the first time.  The more engaging story is that of all the other people whose lives connect to his, and how they navigate their own, unique connections to him, and their own unique struggles and successes.

The Forgetting Spell by Lauren Myracle.  This is the second book in a series that I started in the spring (Wishing Day was the first), and it follows the next Blok sister, Darya, as she approaches her 13th birthday.  She is a bit more cynical than Natasha was in the first book, but she ends up having her own reasons to be this way.  I don’t think I liked this one as much as the first book, but I’ll still read the third book when it comes out this spring.

Angelfall by Susan Ee.  This was a book club selection.  Apparently angels are the new vampires.  This was a weird book about a teenage girl, Penryn, living in California after the angels have attacked the humans in an apocalyptic rage. She meets up with Raffe (who ends up being Raphael, the archangel, spoiler alert) and they need each other to survive in the world.  Raffe did something to piss the other angels off, and Penryn is just a human, so that’s bad. As happens in young adults books these days, there’s some sexual tension between a mortal teenager and an immortal hottie.  It’s so weird.  He’s thousands of years old and an archangel, but still it might work out in the end?  Speaking of the end, the end of this book is off the rails weird.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. I picked this book for book club a few years ago, and decided to reread it when I was looking for something to read.  I loved this book, and thought the premise was so clever.  Ursula is such an interesting character, and seeing all her different lives is heartbreaking and lovely.  Somehow, Ursula is able to be reborn and live her life over again when she dies.  This creates so many different and fascinating scenarios for her life.  I want to map out everything that happens during her lives and see how they intersect and collide.  Like when she runs into people in lives where she’s never met them, but gets a weird feeling about them.  I need to read the companion book soon.

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green.  This was my first book from Book of the Month and I love John Green.  I haven’t actually read many of his books, but I love his presence on YouTube and how he uses his status as a successful young adult author to inspire and engage his readers.  This book is such a good representation of that.  Aza is the main character, and she is very is very relatable.  She has anxiety and other mental health issues that are important to be addressed in this way.  Green doesn’t shy away from the hard stuff that our youth are living with these days, and gives them the gift of reading a book about someone who has the same doubts, pressures, and unexpected triumphs that they experience in their lives.

Option B by Sheryl Sandberg.  After Jake died, Hannah picked this book for our book club to read.  I’m so happy she did, because I learned so much about grief and resilience from this book.  The main takeaway I found was the idea that Option A isn’t an option anymore, no matter how wonderful and perfect that option felt, so we have the right and the opportunity to move forward to find Option B.  There are some amazing ideas of how to support friends when they are experiencing grief (at times, this book made me mad – like how she name dropped so much.  I mean, I’d love to take my friends to my private island like Mark Zuckerberg did for Sheryl, but I can’t really do that), and perspective on how we can have expectations on how other people should grieve, and how that’s a pretty shitty thing to do. 

Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance by Ruth Emmie Lang.  This was a great book.  It had that magical realism that I love so much.  It was another Book of the Month selection – by the way, I love Book of the Month and I’ve really enjoyed all the selections I’ve gotten.  This book centers around Weylyn Grey – a boy who was raised by wolves and has some peculiar powers.  Again, the perspective shifts around between people who interact with Weylyn during his interesting and uncommon life.

All the Ugly and Wonderful Things by Bryn Greenwood.  This book was hard to put down, but also hard to read.  It was an amazing story that was touching and moving and heartbreaking.  It is told from different points of view, which, I’m learning, is a writing style that I find really interesting.  It did bother me, though, how some of the chapters were in first person, while some were in third.  I figured that the more important characters, who were living the story, were telling it in first person, while the characters who were more on the outside had a third person narrative.  But that wasn’t even true for all the chapters.  The story is about Wavy, who is a tragic little girl whose life has been difficult, at best.  I love child narrators and stories about children, and this book was no different.  At times, I felt so uncomfortable rooting for the love story because it was so such an unconventional love story.  My book club mostly agreed that this was a really good, well-liked book, that we would each have a hard time recommending to people because it made us feel uncomfortable.  But, I would totally recommend it to people.  If that makes sense at all.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel.  I read this book after seeing Evynne’s Contemporary American Songbook show at the Shedd.  She did a few songs from the show that is based on this graphic novel.  I don’t read many graphic novels, so it was fun to do something a little different.  It is a beautifully written and drawn memoir about the author’s family – most specifically her father, who was gay and killed himself.  It is honest and dark and funny and I really enjoyed it.  Now I really want to see Fun Home performed.

Wishing Day By Lauren Myracle.  This is a really great story about a girl in a special town.  It’s a young adult novel that is part of a trilogy.  Natasha lives in Willow Hill, where every girl, when they turn 13, gets to make three wishes – The first wish is an impossible wish. The second is a wish she can make come true herself. And the third is the deepest wish of her secret heart.  Natasha is a typical 13 year old girl, but she lives in a world with magic and wishes that can come true.  There is a good mystery and the characters are fun and likeable.  The only thing I don’t like is something that I don’t like in a lot of young adult series these days – they just leave off on a cliffhanger.  I mean, I get that it’s fun to leave things open that need to be solved throughout the series, but I like some sense of closure.  JK Rowling did this really well in her series – even though we knew there were bigger issues that weren’t resolved, she closed up each book and left us with a satisfying ending.  Wishing Day almost seemed like a long introduction to the series – a lot of exposition of the setting and backstory.  That being said, I look forward to reading the other books when they come out, so I’m not that mad about it.

Are You My Mother? By Alison Bechdel.  This is a follow-up to Fun Home, but more about Alison’s mother this time.  It actually was more of a meta-book that was about how Alison and her mother connected throughout the writing of Fun Home.  It also goes into how Alison has dealt with her life through an in-depth study of psychoanalysis.  It actually brought up a lot of information and questions about how we raise children, and how the way we were raised as affected us as adults.  The narrative wasn’t as engaging as Fun Home, but the psychology was interesting to learn, and having it presented as a graphic novel certainly made the details easier to read and understand.

Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.  This is my second time reading this one.  I read it with my book club a couple years ago and really enjoyed it (maybe ‘enjoyed’ is the wrong word).  I thought it was fascinating and I love this genre – the dystopian/ post-apocalyptic thing.  This book is particularly interesting because the future isn’t too distant.  I mean, Offred remembers a culture that is very similar to ours now and everything changes to the hyper-religious, hyper-patriarchal culture of Gilead within a couple years.  It’s fascinating, and more terrifying to think of things changing so quickly.  Obviously this book is well-written and well crafted, considering it is written by Atwood.  It’s beautiful and haunting and disturbing.  This time through, I was really struck by the fact that it doesn’t follow a typical narrative arch.  I mean, when you think about it, nothing really happens and nothing is ever really resolved.  This doesn’t sound like a glowing review, but literarily, it is really successful and really fascinating.