I was so reluctant to start this book. The cover just screams “twee” and “manic pixie dream girl” but someone here, who knows who, had written a sufficiently glowing review that it made it to my TBR list and well – there are rules. Once it’s on the TBR, I have to at least try it. But believe me, I wouldn’t have otherwise. And man would I have missed out. Weird Girl and What’s His Name is such a sweet, tender, funny book. The pace […]
She had me at Dolly Parton.
Dumplin’, whose real name is Willowdean, is a smart, kind, capable, funny, and fat (her term) 16-year-old in small-town Texas. Being sixteen is sucky enough, am I right?!, but the “fat” part causes even more trouble than one would expect for Dumplin’ since her mom is the local pageant queen-turned-pageant director, still living on her own pageant days, staying thin to fit in a 30-year-old dress. She was herself once Miss Teen Blue Bonnet and you better believe that’s a big effin’ deal in Clover […]
A Meh Grows in Brooklyn
When I was growing up, my mother always told me that, if I couldn’t think of something nice to say, I shouldn’t say anything at all. Good thing I thought of something nice to say about this book, or this review would’ve been a lot harder to write. August is a Tennessee girl who gets taken to Brooklyn after bad stuff goes down back home. After a lot of time spent staring out the window, she eventually makes friends with a trio of talented, intelligent, […]
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 […]