Along for the Ride - Sarah Dessen

It’s been a while since I’ve read Sarah Dessen, although not by choice.  She is one of my all-time favorite authors and I haven’t found a book of hers that I haven’t loved.  And Along for the Ride is no exception.  What started out as a fairly predictable story line – the summer before college finding yourself story – ended up being so much deeper than I would have imagined.  Sure, I picked this book up because I wanted a good summer, young adult, romance kind of read.  But Dessen got me hooked on the characters and kept me turning the pages as fast as I was able to so I could see more.  An enticing story filled with heart wrenching twists and hopeful turns, Sarah Dessen doesn’t disappoint.

One of the things I liked most about this book was how none of the characters were perfect.  Usually, I’ve found, the protagonist’s love interest and/or best friend and/or sibling is held on a sort of pedestal as being flawless.  As always having the answers, having everything figured out, and they help the protagonist in their journey to find themselves.  Sure, the reader gets the same satisfaction of seeing the main character change as the story progresses, but it just isn’t the same as seeing two flawed people work things out together.  And frankly, the first option just isn’t realistic.  No human is perfect, and so no character should be perfect either.  I can admit that in Along for the Ride, Eli, the main character’s friend/love interest (no spoilers, this is obvious from the back cover) is flawed, but it shows less than Auden’s flaws.  Which is perfectly reasonable seeing as the story is told from Auden’s perspective and Eli is characterized as a quiet loner from the beginning.  So while we see more of Auden’s flaws because we’re in her head, my previous point stands because we see and get to know Eli with his flaws and problems and insecurities.  He’s real, she’s real, and that helps make this story more real.

While most of the characterization in the story was wonderfully done (none of the character’s blended together and I cared about the little side stories), I found the parents to be a little flat.  Auden’s mother, father, and step mother all felt like their story lines were there to remind the reader of Auden’s internal conflict.  She could be cold and kind of a bitch like her mother, she could settle down and start popping out kids like her step mother, or she could wrap herself up in her studies like her father.  I acknowledge that Auden’s parental relationships are directly tied to the flaws that make her so realistic, I just wanted to see a little less of them and more of Auden’s thoughts about them and what they’ve done with their lives.  Along for the Ride is set in that seemingly magical summer between high school and college and I think Auden comparing the different paths the adults in her life have taken could have been an interesting way to show more of her character.  Basically, the parents could have been used to further the character development of the protagonist but I feel like they’re more props that Dessen put into the story to give it some more action and emotion and it fell flat for me.

Role of the parents aside, I absolutely loved this book.  It was in the running as my favorite Sarah Dessen book, but This Lullaby still holds that title (which I highly recommend, by the way).  This is a smooth read with a satisfying ending.  There were parts where I held my breath, waiting for the resolution that I expected and then had to wait a little longer for Dessen to turn my expectations into something even better.  A fast read, an emotional read, a tender read, a must read.

Along for the Ride - Sarah Dessen

A must read, perfect for summer

383 pages

Rating: 4/5

Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares

Yes, that Ann Brashares and yes, that Sisterhood.  The sisterhood of the traveling pants is back!  Older, but just as angsty.  This book which is an epilogue of sorts to the original four book series is set 10 years in the future.  The girls are turning thirty, but wrinkles and mom jeans aren't the focal points of this story. We get to see how the four girls have grown up.  What they are doing with their lives, who their spending their lives with, and how the sisterhood is going while they're apart.  This book was filled with lots of twists and turns, some of which made me tear up with happiness and some of which made me shun the book for a few days out of anger.  But, this book was an epilogue, it did its duty, and as far as I'm concerned it did a pretty good job.

 What I liked about this book was Brashares' handle on the plot.  Looking back on it, she ran a very tight ship when it came to exposing plot elements.  She seemed to know exactly when I needed more information and when my imagination could fill in the gaps.  This is something I appreciated very much because I find all too often that authors try to walk their readers through the plot so that there aren't too many surprises that might ruffle the readers' feathers.  Brashares doesn't do this unless absolutely necessary and I'm not ashamed to admit that I was surprised at the end and some of my assumptions about what happened were totally smashed.  It was awesome.  I haven't been that surprised by a book in years.  And the best part was that I wasn't even expecting to get fooled.  I read my fair share of thrillers/suspense books and I'm always a bit weary that maybe the nice guy we meet at the beginning could very well turn out to be the murderer.  But I wasn't expecting to be surprised with this book and it was a nice change of pace.

What I didn't like about this book was that the girls didn't sound any more grown up at thirty than they did at eighteen.  I wanted to see their character and personality though older eyes.  Maybe have Carmen curse under her breath in Spanish during a meeting, or have Lena get lost in a drawing on the bus to work.  Just something to indicate that this is, indeed, ten years later.  I didn't get the sense that them being 30 had anything to do with the story.  The main hurdles in the plot line could have been dealt with just as well in a fifth book taking place right after the fourth.  It felt like the ten year gap was only used as a way to emphasize the fact that the four girls have been separated for a while.  In my opinion, this space could have been accomplished with them going to different colleges or something similar.  That way, the girls could still sound like teenage girls and it would not have made the characters ring false, which is what I felt happened.  At least it was that way in the beginning of the book when Brashares was filling the reader in on the lives of the girls.  I felt like the characters were falling flat for the first fifty pages and it was so close to making me put the book down and walk away.  The only thing that saved the book for me was the fact that the big plot element happened on page 63 and from there on it didn't matter that the girls were thirty, because their age doesn't have any impact on how they acted the rest of the book.  It was about their emotions and relationships and that's when the book hooked me.  A little late, but at least it did it at all.

To wrap it up, this was a pretty solid book.  I think it does fit in as more of an epilogue than the fifth book in the series, but it was a very good epilogue.  All of my questions got answered by the end and it left me with a warm feeling that the Sisterhood will continue on despite the trials and tribulations they've faced.  It was a bit slow at the beginning, but I urge readers to push through until the big plot point at about page 60.  You'll know exactly which one I mean when you get to it.  I wish I could tell you more, but this blog is spoiler fee as always :)

349 pages
Rating: 3/5 stars

Good epilogue, a little rough, but overall satisfactory

Not That Kind of Girl - Siobhan Vivian

If you’re an active reader of young adult fiction, you’ve probably heard of Siobhan Vivian.  Her most recent novel, titled The List, came out to rave reviews (as of this post, it has 4.5/5 stars on Amazon.com, which is one of the places I go to read review).  Not That Kind of Girl is Vivian’s second novel and I will be reading all of them.  This novel centers around Natalie Sterling during her senior year of high school.  The book’s title hits home what this story is about – a girl discovering what kind of girl she is.  Identity is a constant question in this novel.  Natalie consistently draws lines between her and the other girls at her school.  But the events in the novel lead both the reader and, eventually, Natalie to question what is the difference between her and the other girls.  Is she really the kind of girl she thinks she is?  And is the answer to that question a bad thing?  Vivian excellently captures the identity crisis that we all begin to experience during our teenage years – an experience that lasts much longer than the four years of high school.  This book will resonate with anyone who is still trying to figure out who they are and where they stand in the world.  And if you’re one of the lucky few who has that figured out, this book will pull you right back into that time where you didn’t.  It was an emotional roller coaster that I didn’t want to end.

I was amazed at how incredibly relatable the characters in this book were and how realistic the setting felt.  The characters were not cliché or stock at all.  The characters start out playing the usual roles of student council president, quarterback, ditzy freshmen, etc.  But as the book progresses, we see these characters break out of these roles and become people.  At one point, one of the characters says that since he has sisters, he doesn’t like it when boys are sexist and crude and my heart just melted.  The same sort of transformation occurs in the main character, which made her much more likable.  At the beginning, I felt like she came off as sort of a bitch.  Real stuck up and better than everyone.  But she softened as the book went on and I actually found myself relating a lot to her.  I could also see a lot of myself in Autumn and the other characters, although more so Natalie.  And while I could see a lot of my personality in her, she was also a lot different.  In a strange way, it made me see what my high school life could have been like.  Being able to relate to this character emphasized the emotions in the story and the change in the main character over the 300 pages and being able to see that same change reflected in my own life - which, in my case, was a positive change.

What I found difficult to get my head around with this book is Natalie’s (for lack of a better term) stupidity when it comes to her relationships.  She has this irritating bullheadedness about her that at times made me want to throw the book across the room in frustration.  This is hard to explain without spoilers, but there are times in the novel where she is blind to what is going on around her.  And on the one hand, I really liked it because the novel was written in first person and if she was totally aware of everything and super self-aware, she wouldn’t feel like a real teenager.  But I feel that Vivian went too far in this direction.  At least it would have been nice to get some acknowledgement that she could be denying or ignoring her feelings when it comes to her interpersonal relationships.  It was frustrating, but not so irritating that I had to put down the book (which has happened before). 

Overall, this was a fast paced, funny, smart, and overall tightly put together story that made me keep reading.  It made me cry, get angry, and turn the pages in hope that the story was going where I wanted it too.  Emotional roller coaster is the best way I can describe my reading of this book and it is a ride I would take over and over again.

 Rating: 4/5.  Emotional roller coaster.  Seriously.

336 pages

Post Format

I realized, unfortunately, a few days after posting my first review that I should probably explain how I review books.  If you’ve read any formal book reviews, such as the ones in the New York Times, you’ll see that mine are very different.  I have critiqued many short stories in my writing classes, all of which required a formal print out of my comments so the professor could make sure we were all reading the stories ahead of time and were thinking critically about the writing craft and all that jazz.  Anyway, these critiques never had a real format to them.  Bullet points were fine, long paragraphs were fine, even a page or two of hand written notes were fine.  But when I took Writing Youth Literature, we were finally given a general format to follow and that is the same format I now use for all my fiction classes and it is the one I’ll use here. 

My posts will be formatted (loosely) as follows:

General summary and broad feelings about the book

What I liked about it

What I disliked about it

Last thoughts

Picture and rating

There may be times where these sections blend together or get mixed around, but these are the general points I would like to hit with every post.  And, as always, my posts are 100% spoiler free!

Are These My Basoomas I See Before Me? - Louise Rennison

First book review of this blog is Are These My Basoomas I See Before Me? by Louise Rennison.  This is the tenth (and final) installment in the Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series.  I read book one of this series back in middle school and have eagerly awaited every subsequent book.  This one was published in 2009 so I'm obviously behind a bit.  But even after a three year hiatus from the series, I picked right back up with the characters immediately.  When I was picking this book up from the library, I wondered if it would be smart of me to start a few books back, just to refresh my memory.  But I didn't want to carry a bunch of books back home so I opted to just go with it and I could always Google any plot questions I had along the way.  Google was not needed.  It was like I had never left Georgia, Jazz and the rest of the Ace Gang and their boy troubles.  And I think that that is the mark of a great series and one of the reasons I picked it as my first book.

This series is considered 'teen lit' or, as I prefer, young adult fiction.  It is about a group of teenage girls and their relationships with themselves, their parents, and, of course, boys.  It is written in the epistolary style (I think that is the correct phrasing of it), if you want to use the correct literary term.  But in everyday speech, it's written as a diary.  Georgia's diary.  I really like pieces written in this style because I feel like it makes the reader more easily immersed in this world.  It feels like you are reading a real girl's diary.  and you immediately get Georgia's take on everything without a filter or without the 'author' getting in the way to keep some things secret for a twist later.  And, in this series, the time stamps for the entries are in real time.  So you don't even have Georgia glossing over some things as she sums up her day at night, she is giving the reader a play by play of every angst and emotion filled teenage girl moment.  And it is wonderful.  Louise Rennison did a great job capturing the teenage girl voice.  Never once was there a place where I felt that Georgia wouldn't have used that word or she seemed a bit too self-aware for a teenage girl.  Rennison was flawless in this sense.  I should mention that this series is filled with British teenage slang (Rennison is British) so it is possible that maybe the slang used in these books is outdated, but I, as an American, have no idea so it seemed flawless to me.  And along those same lines, there is a glossary in the back which I found very helpful. Georgia is a real teenager.  She has her insecurities, gets lost in her thoughts, over-thinks little things that boys say, and fights with her parents.  She is real.  I could see parts of myself in Georgia, which I think is a real strength of this character.  She is by no means generic or boring, she is one of the most interesting characters I've read in a long time, and everyone can see a part of themselves in her.

It could be a downfall of the style, it could be because it was the final book of the series, but I saw the ending of this book coming from a mile away.  And by that I meant that about half way though the book I went "oh, I bet X,Y, and Z are going to happen" and then as each new major plot point unraveled, it went along with my guess and then at the end, I was correct!  Don't get me wrong, I love it when a book ends the way I want it too.  And its not like I guessed the murder's identity half way though or anything major like that.  The, what I found obvious, plot movement toward the resolution didn't ruin the journey for me.  I was still turning pages just as quickly to see if my guess was correct.  I didn't know until literally the last page if I was correct or not.  I just wish that I didn't know what was going to happen until maybe a few pages before.  I wanted there to be more mystery to the journey.

Overall, I say read it.  Read the whole series.  It honestly won't take you long.  They are just fun books.  If you're past your teen years, you can reconnect to the highs and lows of those years.  And if you're in your teens, you can see that someone else is going through the same things you are, which is a lot of help sometimes.

*Special note: there is now a movie based on the first books in the series (first two I think?)

Rating: 3/5.  Fun fun fun reading
310 pages

Hi!

This is, I suppose, the mandatory hello-and-welcome-to-my-blog post.  I know that I'm not going into this with an audience, and I very well might not gain any readers.  But this blog is just for fun, a little bit so I can remember what I've read, but mostly so I remember that reading is fun.  In all honesty, being an English major has kind of ruined reading for me.  I used to read whatever I wanted just for fun.  But now, I feel like I should only read books that are on the New York Times bestseller list or something.  Which, of course, isn't to say that the books on that list aren't enjoyable or good reads, but I want to go back to the summer before 9th grade where I read close to a book a day and I read whatever looked good.  I judged books by their covers and I fully immersed myself in the pages.  I want to go back to that time where reading was just fun.  Where I didn't think about motifs or authorial intent.  But where I connected with characters and cried when things didn't go as they planned.  Where I got mad at books that ended too soon or that I didn't agree with a character's actions.  But that is what good books do.  They engage their readers.

Yes, I'm an English major at a well-known University.  I can write essays on symbolism, motifs, imagery, and whatever other literary terms you want.  But that isn't what this blog is for.  This is me going back to the summer of 2005 and reading for the hell of it.