Tag Archives: Coming of Age Fiction Book Review

Dear Unknown Blogger – Thanks For The Book

Posted on by
2

Amazon.com

I must admit to deciding to read this book based on a blog posting that I can no longer locate. The blog was written by a young (teens? 20s?) woman who was making a comment about trying to discuss this book with a 30+ year old woman only to discover the older person had never heard of it.

While the post was mostly about generational gap communication (or so to speak), it made me curious enough to track down a copy and read it.

The first thing I realized was the existence of a movie I vaguely remembered seeing in random advertisements…somewhere. (I don’t have regular television, only Netflix and Amazon Prime, so visual advertisements are encountered online and in newspapers.)

The second thing I realized was how impossible it is to put this book down. Simply impossible! The first sentence drew me in. I stopped reading because it was time to get back to work or make dinner or…whatever…but the moment my eyes scanned random words from a sentence on a page it was like some irresistible force was sucking me back into the story.

Seriously!

At one point, I turned on my Kindle to check the time and the state of my email (read: how many unread messages have piled up?), glanced at the page long enough for my mind to register that this book was still open, read half a sentence and ten minutes later I was forcing myself to close the book, within the reader (before shutting it off), so that I could get back to my regularly scheduled life.

I really wish I knew what kind of mojo this author has to turn a simple and (frankly) uneventful story into such an aggressive attention grabber. Don’t get me wrong, the story was very good, but the magic is in the style, not the plot.

The Fault in Our Stars is a love story between two teenage cancer survivors (Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters). Teenagers facing both love and death. It’s a mix that could easily devolve into ultra-dramatic and highly annoying youth angst. Yet, somehow, it never loses the solidity of reality. It’s a book that gently pulls on the heartstrings instead of dragging them out of your chest. It presents the characters in moments of strength and weakness. It portrays cancer in a way that is almost to real.

I am of the opinion that the reality of life lived by the dying is the strongest aspect to the plot. There are many points where the popular perception of the dying is discussed by the dying in blunt, honest and occasionally sarcastic tones. It frankly examines the realities the not-yet-dying either do not consider or purposely chose to refrain from acknowledging. It also frames these observations and events within an almost to-perfect-to-be-true relationship.

Obviously, I enjoyed the book.

If you are the blogger who inadvertently recommended it to this no-longer-20-something reader, I thank you. If you are a reader (of any age) who is still considering cracking the spine of this text, here are a few quotes to whet your appetite:

““Augustus Waters,” I said, looking up at him, thinking that you cannot kiss anyone in the Anne Frank House, and then thinking that Anne Frank, after all, kissed someone in the Anne Frank House, and that she would probably like nothing more than for her home to have become a place where the young and irreparably broken sink into love”

““The world,” he said, “is not a wish-granting factory,” and then he broke down, just for one moment, his sob roaring impotent like a clap of thunder unaccompanied by lightning, the terrible ferocity that amateurs in the field of suffering might mistake for weakness.”

“If you go to the Rijksmuseum, which I really wanted to do—but who are we kidding, neither of us can walk through a museum. But anyway, I looked at the collection online before we left. If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You’d see Jesus on the cross, and you’d see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you’d see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.”

-The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

On The Day You Die

Posted on by
1

Amazon.com

As someone who was a teenager during the late 1980s, and fully remembers the hysteria surrounding AIDs, this book brought back many memories – not all of them good. It’s an excellent and authentic tale. However, it portrays teenagers doing things that most parents would prefer their children refrain from considering, much less actually doing. I highly recommend this novel to fellow cold-war era survivors, but I’m not certain I would feel comfortable handing it over to a teenager.

On the other hand, when I was a late-80s teen, teachers and other adults handed me novels like The Scarlet Letter, The Lord of the Flies, Watership Down and a handful of Russian novels that I strongly suspect I understood better than my instructors – particularly when it came to the methods of survival utilized by primary characters. Perhaps I am overly cautious.

Quotes:

“I figured that on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you’d have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed...I thought about Finn. How he did whatever he wanted. Just like my mother said. He never let the tunnel squash him. But still, there he was. In the end he was still crushed to death by his own choices. Maybe what Toby said was right. Maybe you had to be dying to finally get to do what you wanted.”

“I used to think maybe I wanted to become a falconer, and now I’m sure of it, because I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.“

–Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

Unforgettable Wild Blueberries

Posted on by
Reply

Amazon.com

Back in the late 1980s, while working in the boundary waters for the SCA as a teenaged volunteer worker, there was a weekend when the team took a canoe trip to an island, just for fun. Given we were living on an island and every trip to a work site required a canoe made the fact that we were canoeing to an island rather mundane – which is odd to think about, so many years later.

The ‘boundary waters’ is a term applied (by locals) to a very large area of water and land lying between the United States and Canada. It is used to refer to areas of Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin (on the USA side). Yet, the landscape has many similarities, across hundreds of miles. This novel is located in Minnesota, which is where I was located while working the ‘boundary waters,’ and some of the descriptions of the landscape and life in the outdoors reminded me of that summer in Superior National Forest and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.

Which brings me back to the island. To get to a specific hillside, we had to canoe to the island itself, tie up the canoes, hike in, tie our shoes and supplies in bags held onto our heads and swim across this amazingly beautiful still-water (and extremely deep) lake. It was a short swim and the water felt wonderful. On the other side was a hillside covered in blueberry bushes and we spent most of the afternoon just relaxing and collecting blueberries.

When I read the following quote, I immediately remembered the island, the swim and the blueberries. Everything described below made me think ‘yeah, I know that.’

QUOTE:

“He picked a handful for both of them to see. Blueberries. Small ones. These were like the green berries she had seen on the Big Island, except they were blue. A whole hillside of blue. Nika put one in her mouth. The taste was sharp and sweet, better than the fat puffy blueberries from the store. Ian laughed as he watched her face. The three of them went to work. For a long time there was no sound except the drumming of blueberries onto the bottoms of aluminum pots. Nika moved to a new patch of little bushes heavy with berries, eating most of what she picked. Ian looked her way as she stuffed another handful in her mouth, as though she were unwrapping a gift he’d given her. He smiled, then returned to picking. She was blown away that the blueberries just grew here. Nobody planted them. Maybe they had been growing here for a thousand years. Or more. Eagerly she began filling her own pot.“

–Summer of The Wolves by Polly Carlson-Voiles