I read this book when it was first published and I was recently out of high school. It appealed, very much, to the dramatic teenager in me, who thought there was nothing more romantic than the tragic love of Moulin Rouge and whose own high school relationship was characterized by high highs and low lows. It’s not that The History of Love is, itself, histrionic, but Nicole Krauss does employ a very dreamy, lyrical style of prose that expresses romance intrinsically, bursting out from the […]
“I do not want to be anyone’s model for becoming a better person.”
I don’t want to sound overly dramatic when I say this, but I’m gonna go for it nonetheless: rape, or the possibility of rape, is such constant, persistent background noise in the life of most women that we forget the extent to which we negotiate around the threat. Even women who don’t consciously think of themselves as having ever explicitly feared rape or changed their behavior to avoid it will answer in the affirmative when you ask them more specific questions: do you and your […]
“I like flaws. I think they make things interesting.”
This is a fairly uninformed opinion, but as a casual reader of YA I feel like there has been a dearth, of late, of straightfoward, non- high concept/fantasy YA. Sarah Dessen seems like she hails from a class of YA authors from the mid to late aughts that mine realistic, if unusual, situations to examine the poignant emotional minutiae of the teen experience. The Truth About Forever is the sensitive and quietly resonant story of Macy Queen, who had been the first person of her […]
“I’m only twelve. But I’ve been that for a long time.”
I don’t read a lot of horror, nor do I watch a lot of horror, because generally speaking, I’m not the kind of person who derives entertainment or thrills from being scared. A little suspense is great, and I can also handle a pretty good amount of gore, so it’s hard to say what goes from acceptable to nightmare fuel, but in any case, when it gets to be too much, I’m out. So, a book, movie, or show labeled “horror” needs a lot of […]
Beware the gossipy glitter birds
3.5 stars I experienced highs and lows during Reconstructing Amelia, a maybe-maybe-not YA mystery that alternates between the point of view of fifteen-year-old Amelia and her mother following what appears to be Amelia’s suicide at her swanky private high school. As her mother, Kate, tries to make some sense of the details around Amelia’s death, we also go back to Amelia’s life in the months before her death and are treated to the slow reveal of her spiral. The closer Kate gets to the truth, […]
One voice with the burden of representing many in the mainstream YA landscape
I’m going to keep this simple: as much as it was the case with The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian I don’t have it in me to *critique* If I Was Your Girl on the same level as I would a more … normative … book. It’s is very simple, mostly very pleasant, with Amanda, a milquetoast, blank-slate protagonist who wants nothing more than to be liked, to fit in, to have friends, to be confident, to be safe, and to be […]
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