As a piece of art, I have to give it to Dave Eggers. AHBWOSG is carefully composed, wonderfully constructed, funny, poignant, and moving. But it’s also a pile of emotional bullshit that took me ages to read, and I couldn’t get away from it fast enough once I had inhaled the last intentionally-breakneck run-on paragraph. I have now moved on, immediately and purposefully, to “Men Explain Things to Me.” But back to the “Staggering Genius,” which is a memoir, slightly fictionalized, as Eggers explains […]
“That’s what the cool people who mock breeders don’t understand: that there can be a love bigger than two people.”
After breezing through the David Wong books, it seemed a natural next step to check out his Cracked colleague, Wayne Gladstone. I can’t say I came away from this book with near the excitement or sense of joy. There’s something lacking, here. Specifically, the first three quarters of the book leave much to be desired. In the world of Notes from the Internet Apocalypse, the internet has mysteriously disappeared, leaving the world in, well, pretty much the same state it’s currently in. Ignore the “apocalypse” […]
Goodbye Ziggy Stardust…
It’s another picture book, you guys, so buckle up. I have Opinions. Some of you may be familiar with Melanie Watt from her Scaredy Squirrel series, although I don’t know how popular she is outside of Canada. Scaredy Squirrel is a good series for kids who are a little hesitant about new things. Childhood is scary. That series is fine but has never caught my interest particularly. This book however! This book is gorgeous. The illustrations are beautiful and detailed with a uniquely 60s aesthetic. […]
Teenagers work through their grief
I can’t remember how this book got on my wish list. I haven’t read anything else by Meg Wolitzer. I generally stay with young adult books and she is more known for her adult books than this YA one. In any case, I put Belzhar on my list at some point and it became available recently. I had no idea what to expect, but was quickly drawn into a world of troubled teens. The story is told from perspective of a high school student named […]
Miles’ adventures in boarding school
3.5 stars Miles Halter doesn’t really have any friends in his Florida high school and persuades his parents to send him to the same boarding school in Alabama that his father once attended. When he gets there, he is quickly included in the already established circle of friends including his roommate Chip, usually referred to as the Colonel; the intense and unpredictable Alaska, whom Miles falls in love with pretty much at first sight; and Takumi, who seems like the most sane of the group. […]
Special Topics in Grief
I loved Wolitzer’s earlier book, The Interestings, and in some ways this young adult novel seems like an offshoot thematically. Instead of a summer camp in upstate New York, the characters in Belzhar are at The Wooden Barn, a “therapeutic boarding school” for teens in Vermont. This is basically Jam Gallahue’s story; she was sent to this school because she has been mourning the death of her British exchange student boyfriend for too long. Jam is chosen to be part of a special topics class […]