I loved this book. I was not expecting to; it was a book I read for my book club and I knew nothing about it before I bought it, and I was very grumpy while reading the first 75 pages of it. But then it hit home.
This is a YA novel about four teenagers living in Alaska in the early 1970's. The book shifts POV chapter by chapter, and the first three chapters felt almost unbearably bleak and sad to me. I spent a lot of time in my twenties reading beautifully written books about miserable people living miserable lives, and I don't want to do that anymore. I was very concerned that this would be another one of those kinds of books.
Instead, the book slowly begins to reveal the connections between the four characters, and the entire story braids itself together, with a bit of magical realism to tie off the loose ends. There is still sadness and tragedy, but the hope that is woven through each of their stories feels both necessary and earned, in the end. And the writing is incredibly lovely all the way through; I know very little about Alaska, but the surety of the writing made me trust this depiction implicitly. Also, the title fits the novel perfectly in a way that not many titles do.
I went into this book expecting to slog through it for my book group and instead I ended up crying (from happiness) over the end. Who knew.
Grade: A
This is a YA novel about four teenagers living in Alaska in the early 1970's. The book shifts POV chapter by chapter, and the first three chapters felt almost unbearably bleak and sad to me. I spent a lot of time in my twenties reading beautifully written books about miserable people living miserable lives, and I don't want to do that anymore. I was very concerned that this would be another one of those kinds of books.
Instead, the book slowly begins to reveal the connections between the four characters, and the entire story braids itself together, with a bit of magical realism to tie off the loose ends. There is still sadness and tragedy, but the hope that is woven through each of their stories feels both necessary and earned, in the end. And the writing is incredibly lovely all the way through; I know very little about Alaska, but the surety of the writing made me trust this depiction implicitly. Also, the title fits the novel perfectly in a way that not many titles do.
I went into this book expecting to slog through it for my book group and instead I ended up crying (from happiness) over the end. Who knew.
Grade: A
No comments:
Post a Comment