This book takes place in the late 1960s, around the summer of love. I wasn’t around then, so I’m sure that a lot of my ideas of that time are influenced by popular culture. This isn’t one of those books that glamorizes that era, but seems to exist solely in between the two worlds of structured society and drug-saturated counterculture. The protagonist is Evie, a girl that would be described as “fourteen going on thirty.” Evie is a bit of an outsider in her own […]
Break down the self, offer yourself up like dust to the universe.
In the Cannonball Read Facebook group, someone awesome posted an article called “The best books of 2016 list you get when you combine 36 “Best Books of 2016” lists.” The Girls is 6th on that list, appearing in 10 of the 36 “Best Books of 2016” lists combined for the “ultimate list.” It’s okay. Here’s what it has going for it: it’s completely real. Here’s what it has against it: it’s not new. The Girls is the story of an older woman reminiscing about that […]
I went to the library and checked out a book because I was getting scared.
I just reviewed Becky Albertalli’s “Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda” and I’m not going to lie, I was reading “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” at the same time, and sometimes I had trouble telling the difference between them. And I mean that with every compliment, because, as I wrote in my “Simon” review, there’s a strong and important tradition of novels that normalize the alienation of adolescence, and the millions of forms that it can take. “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” is […]
All the Yes: The Worst Years of Your Life.
The back of this book tells you this collection of short stories is “delightful and terrifying” which immediately drew me in, because I can’t think of two better words that together, conjure up adolescence. In his introduction, the editor Poirier states the stories stem “from nostalgia for the intense and sometimes confusing emotions that we all experienced at this time in our lives.” The cover of the book has a drawing of a frog, belly side up, ready for dissection. This gave me an overwhelming […]