Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler

Review: There is a time in everyone’s life when we befriend someone who we will eventually regret having had contact with at all. And after this befriending occurs, regardless of whether it’s a platonic or a romantic relationship, we can always look back and say to ourselves (and, let’s just admit right here) that the person we were with is truly a terrible person (although usually they’re not). Alternately, we sometimes think: why didn’t I see all the terrible things they were doing when we were together, whereas now I can look back and tell myself how very stupid I was?

Why We Broke Up is an exploration of those feelings, and also of the blindness that so inherently goes with them. The main character, Min, is a role model for girls everywhere, in that:

a) she made a huge mistake, and

b) she did not let it define her, which is not to mention,

c) she did not ignore what happened and pretend it was insignificant. In fact, Min so artfully details the happenings of this book that you almost forget that, yes, a breakup is inevitable.

Told in snapshots and memorabilia, Daniel Handler has artfully displayed the truth about relationships, and has somehow managed to leave out all the lies we tell ourselves about said relationships.

Artful, funny, and full of don’t do what I did advice, Why We Broke Up is a book that every teenage girl should read.

Summary:

Min is a weird girl. She’s a feminist. She uses big words. She likes to watch old movies and drink strange alcoholic beverages, and she is named after Minerva, Roman goddess of wisdom.

When she meets Ed Slaterton, she never suspects that she and Ed might get together. But, before she knows it, Min is with him at the movies, and they’re kissing beneath weeping willows, and making igloos out of squared eggs and cookies out of stolen sugar.

Min doesn’t change for Ed- at least not on purpose. But she finds herself anxious around her friends, and discovers, too late, that she’s given him more than she should have.

Told in excerpts, with pictures of important aspects of each chapter, like bottles of alcohol and an egg cuber, Min’s story is artfully woven and very creative; a brilliant story.

Between Shades of Gray- Ruta Sepetys

Review:

“Few books are beautifully written, fewer still are important; this novel is both” — The Washington Post

I’ve always been interested in the question of good or evil. Whether or not there even is a question to ask, or humans are just fundamentally flawed beyond recognition of any idealistic pedestal we set ourselves on. In Between Shades of Gray, Ruta Sepetys explores the vicious brutality of Stalin and his followers through this remarkable piece of historical nonfiction.

But this book is more deep and complex than just cruelty and  goodness; it explores, also, the amazing sense of humanity. The inherent sense that there is more. That things get better. And that, as humans, it is our job to capture that feeling, in whatever way possible. For the heroine of this book, she catches those moments in art, showing me and all readers that without art, all would be lost. Art has the power to create, to destroy, to change, to conform, but most of all, to bind. To make a lasting difference.

This book was very well worth reading. It really changed the way I look at things; it made me wish I could draw. But it was very dark. There is a lot of cruelty in this book, and it was very difficult to read because it is so powerful. The imagery in this book will make you cry. It will make you think. And mostly, it will lift you up into a sense of what should be, and what isn’t.

Summary:

Fifteen year old Lina has a future. Everyone says so, and she knows it’s true. She draws the truth, whether it’s bitter or filled with joy. But these drawings, her parents fear, will get her in trouble.

One night, the NKVD shows up in Lina’s home, telling her mother that the family has twenty minutes to be ready to leave. Lina’s father is gone. Her mother tells Lina and her younger brother Jonas that their father will meet them. They are put into a truck with many other Lithuanians and driven to a train station. Once at the station, they are loaded into a cattle car, and driven from Kaunas, Lithuania, to Vilnius, where Lina, her brother, and a boy who is in their car, Andrius, sneak away to search for their fathers. Lina finds her father and he tells her to draw him clues that will lead him eventually to where they are.

They get back into the cattle car, and drive for forty days, hungry, starving. They arrive at Atlai labor camp, where they are worked hard and some are forced into prostitution. Andrius and Lina fall in love, just as Lina, Jonas, and their mother are taken again, this time much farther away, to Trofimovsk, the North Pole. The freezing temperatures kill many before the family is saved. But salvation comes too late for Lina’s mother.

Ten Miles Past Normal by Frances O’Roark Dowell

Different. Everyone has their own philosophy about that word. I find that the two most common are that:

 

 

a) being different should be celebrated

and b) differences should be brushed under the mat.

There is another philosophy emerging from the center of our culture, and that is the idea that being different isn’t special. That being different isn’t wrong or right, but that’s it’s not a particularly interesting thing to be either.

And then there’s Normal. That’s a word that carries a lot of baggage. Normalcy is appreciated in our culture, and alongside normalcy live oppression and fear. To some, being normal is a good thing. Easy life, easy word. To others, the very idea of normalcy is offensive. Normalcy is conforming. Normalcy is being the dreaded same. And then, to those who live lives they regard as abnormal or other, normal is something to search for.

To the main character of Ten Miles Past Normal, Janie, normal is a state of nonexistence; something she looks for, but it’s never really there; and she doesn’t really know what it is she’s looking for.

One fundamental idea of this book is that normal and different aren’t things you can look for; they’re things you’re born with, that you have to embrace.

Summary:

Ten Miles Past Normal is a coming of age story. Janie, a not-so-normal teen lives on a farm several miles away from her small town. Janie wishes for nothing more than to go to school smelling like something other than goats. She has a classic crush on an unobtainable boy, a funny best friend who has a remarkably smart and rebellious older sister, and a burning desire to make new friends and become who she really is: normal. When Janie and her best friend Sarah get pulled into a band at school, courtesy of unobtainable boy, Janie meets Monster- a 6 foot tall, sweet as honey pie bass player. He volunteers to help her learn the bass.

Janie and Sarah are assigned a women’s rights project, and they eventually decide to do it about a woman named Mrs. Pritchard who founded the Freedom School; a school that taught black people to read and write back in the 40′s. Janie and Sarah start the project, and have successful results.

Janie and Monster start spending time together, just as Sarah gets the idea to break into the building where the Freedom School is. They get caught, and taken to jail. Their parents, having picked them up, are surprisingly lenient about the whole ordeal.

A Mango-Shaped Space by Wendy Mass

There’s something that’s always been a little scary to me about the way our brains work, and that’s the fact that no two of them see things the same way. What the color green looks like to me, for example, may be a very different color to you- to you, my green may look like my red. But we both call them green. On the flip side, we all live in the same level of color intensity- a neon color to me is neon to you- they just aren’t actually the same. In a Mango-Shaped Space, the main character Mia lives in our world. But she lives in our world with a condition called synesthesia, which means, basically, that she sees a color and a shape that coordinate to each sound, letter, or number. They sometimes also have a texture; like wood or cloth. The letter A is sunflower yellow, q is red, with a texture like rusted metal. The sound of   people’s names have different colors; sky blue, mushy like oatmeal, or purple and orange with a slippery texture. Scientists suspect that everyone is born with these colors, but that, for most people, the colors fade as they age out of infancy. For a very rare few, however, the wires in their brain don’t fuse, and the colors live along with them. For these people, these synesthetes, life can be difficult and confusing. Synesthesia isn’t a condition that fades, and much like the rest of us, synesthetes assume that they are living in the same place as everyone else- that all sounds have a color, or a texture. Synesthesia is both a blessing and a curse for many people; spelling is made easy. But math is not- when a purple four and a brown 3 are added together, in the minds of synesthetes, this would not equal a red 7. The same is true for learning languages, and for science.

The lesson to be learned from A Mango-Shaped Space is an obscure one, and one that can easily be interpreted differently. The lesson I took away from this was that the world is not so black and white (no pun intended). I mean to say that, unknowingly, we all live the same confused and messy lives. Your green is different than mine. So is your story, and your fundamental beliefs, and what holds meaning for you. And that’s something that is too easily forgotten.

Summary:

Thirteen year old Mia sees colors in the air. Since she was a child, she’s known that this isn’t normal, but it’s not until she runs into a little boy who tells her that her name is purple and orange that she discovers that she may not be the only “abnormal” one.

After Mia finally tells her parents about her synesthesia, they take her to the family pediatrician who sends her to a psychologist who sends her to a brain studies teacher at the University. He discovers that Mia lives with synesthesia.

Mia embarks on a quest to understand her newfound way of seeing, and on her way there, she destroys a friendship, lies to her parents, and forgets to medicate her cat, Mango.

Things may not be quite perfect in the end, but for Mia, they will always be full of color.

Songs for a Teenage Nomad – Kim Culbertson

Review: Songs for a Teenage Nomad is a novel with depth. It really encapsulates teen emotion and while poignant, the novel is very lifelike in that it keeps up with witty sarcasm and comedy, while also making you really think. Calle will make you laugh and cry, and every song she “remembers”. The characters are real. The dynamics of high school are realistic and balanced, and Calle’s quiet strength and determination are characteristics that everyone wishes they had.

Summary:

Calle has moved around her whole life, since her father left, and when she and her mother end up in Andreas Bay, California, Calle assumes that it will be more of the same. But when her mother seems to settle down with her new boyfriend and her now job, Calle settles into a new life too; new friends and a new place in school, a new crush with a complicated past, and a girl who has a mysterious link with him.

For a while, things go pretty smoothly. And then, Calle’s mom and her mom’s boyfriend have a fight, and Calle worries that her flighty mother will pack them up and move them out again. But Calle’s mother assures her that they won’t. Calle finds a letter from her father in her mother’s drawer, and discovers that her father has been looking for them for a long time. Calle is furious, but her mother insists that there are things that Calle doesn’t know about her father. Calle agrees to leave it alone, but she’s not being truthful.

Calle’s mother and her boyfriend break up, and Calle realizes that soon, her mother will insist on leaving. Upset, Calle tells her crush, Sam, about it. Sam tells his father, who procures Calle’s mom a new address and a new job, and things go back to almost better than normal, except for Calle’s fight with her mom. One night, Calle has coffee by herself while reading a book for English. While she’s drinking, her father walks in and they talk.

Calle comes home from school one day to find her father in the apartment, yelling at her mother. She tells him to leave, and he does, but Calle’s mother says they still have to go.

On their way out, they stop in at a gas station to get supplies, and they discover that there’s been a car crash on the nearby highway. Calle and her mother know immediately who it is that died in the crash. They turn around and go back to Andreas Bay.

Ten Things We Did and Probably Shouldn’t Have – Sarah Mylnowski

Review:

Appropriate scale

This book proved to provide a pretty detailed list of ten things you could do but probably shouldn’t, such as underage drinking, and having unsupervised parties. It’s a personal choice, of course, and April hasn’t really had the ability to make those choices for a long time. So another thing that you could do but probably shouldn’t is anything that has the potential to limit your freedom or your choices. Teenagers make poor choices- that’s probably the understatement of the century. But most of the teenagers I know understand fairly well the consequences behind their decisions. So I guess that even if you’re doing things you probably shouldn’t, you know pretty well what’s behind the doors you’ve chosen to open. It’s almost an inevitability that eventually, somehow, someone will find out, or alternatively, you’ll wish you never had in the first place.

Summary:

When April gets the chance to live with her friend Vi, unsupervised, she jumps at the chance, especially since she has had a ten o’clock curfew since 10th grade. The only problem? April’s dad will never agree to it. So Vi makes a fake email account for both April’s father and Vi’s mother, giving her mother April’s dad’s fake email, and April’s dad gets Vi’s mother’s fake email.

Not too long later, April’s moved in with Vi. She gets money every month, for gas, groceries and rent. April discovers that she does not enjoy grocery shopping, but does enjoy the products, and that she loves cats when she is given a new kitten. They also purchase a hot tub (they call it the Hula).

April and her boyfriend Noah had been planning to have sex for a long time, but when April gets scared of getting pregnant, she goes to Planned Parenthood and gets birth control, forcing Noah to wait until it kicks in. They decide to do it on Valentine’s day, and Vi loses her virginity the night before – Friday the thirteenth.

April’s cat gets run over and she borrows three thousand dollars from a potential drug dealer in order to pay for his surgery.

April’s best friend Marissa comes to stay with them when her parents tell her she can’t go to Israel that summer with her boyfriend (Marissa goes to Jewish Camp).

The night of April’s birthday, Vi decides to throw a wild party and charge admission and snack costs in order to help pay back said drug dealer for the cat.

The drug dealer turns out not to be a drug dealer (he’s a babysitter), April gets an STD, breaks up with Noah, moves out of Vi’s, and goes to live with her mother and brother in France.

If You Liked: Amy and Roger’s Epic Detour, Suzanne Colasanti(author), Jenny Han’s summer series, The Lying Game

Where She Went – Gayle Forman

appropriateness rating

Review:                  Where She Went is about more than finding yourself. It is about the fundamental idea that other people are the ones who make you. In the end, who you want to be is who you’re becoming, and other people are helping you to do that every minute of every day. Where She Went is a poignant reminder of how little time we have. To wonder, to think, to love, to live. Where She Went is a blend of all those things, a potent mixture of future, present, and past, and how irrevocably linked they are.

Summary:

Three years after the tragic accident that killed his girlfriend Mia’s parents and little brother and nearly killed Mia, Adam Wilde is a rock star. But his music is slowly killing him, because it is one of the many things that Mia made impossible to love, to care about.

Mia and Adam had been the perfect couple in high school. “Groovy and the Geek”, as dubbed by Mia’s friend Kim. They both loved music, and each other, and while they were as different as oil and vinegar, salt and pepper, chicken and broccoli, they still managed to fit more perfectly than any literary couple ever invented.

But after Mia’s accident, they both change. Mia drops Adam after she leaves for college, devastating him in the process. Adam goes on with his band, Shooting Star, and Mia goes on to become Julliard’s rising star.

But the rift running through Adam’s band is strong, and deep, so when he discovers that they are scheduled to go on tour on Friday the thirteenth, he latches onto it as an excuse to go a day after the rest of his band.

On his night alone in New York, Adam discovers that Mia is playing a show, and decides to go see her play.

She finds out he’s there, and asks that he be brought backstage. She tells him she’ll give him a tour of her city, which will double as a farewell tour to her own city because she’s leaving soon, to go on a tour of her own.

Through the course of the night, Adam and Mia relive the months of their breakup. They discover things about each other they never knew, and they discover things about themselves that weren’t there before.

If You Liked: If I Stay, Before I Fall, Thirteen Reasons Why, The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer,    The Future of Us, Hate List