February Review

February may be the shortest month of the year, but that doesn't mean there isn't plenty of reading to be done. And this past month, I read books that have automatically been added to my list of favorites.

So let's get cracking.

The book I kick-started the month with was Dale Peck's Sprout. This book is hilariously written, full of teenage whimsy and growth. Peck's descriptions were brilliant, riding the edge between ridiculous and too honest. Sprout follows a high-schooler, nicknamed Sprout, whose teacher recruits him to write in an essay competition at the end of the school year. The novel is written as Sprout's essay and his prep for it, following a rather tumultuous year of his life.

Sprout is, on the surface, about a gay, green-haired boy who is chosen by his teacher to write an essay for a state contest. But, deeper down, it's about a teenager mourning the loss of his mother, his father's mental disappearance, and a yearning for a secure future with an understanding of himself, despite all the obstacles that emerge from simply trying to observe life.

The ending was ultimately unsatisfying, though, but I think that was the point. Growing up is unsatisfying, and in the stage from twelve to probably, like, twenty-nine, life is twisty and strange and full of disappointments. The purpose of Sprout's story is to recognize that there are parts of ourselves that are only visible from the outside. Things other people know about us that we don't.

The book stayed with me, a little hauntingly, a little unsatisfactory, but ultimately a story I will not forget. Sprout was real, if only in the confines of the book, and he'll stay with me as I face an uncertain future and a certainty that I have yet to discover everything about myself.

The book that followed, TJ Klune's Wolfsong, easily became one of my favorites, joining the ranks of books like The Song of Achilles and The Raven Cycle. Klune's book is about family, first and foremost. It's about love and friendship and leaving, but most importantly, it's about coming home. It's also about werewolves and falling in love, but all the magic just adds to the grace of what is a story of finding home in the person who knows you best.

Ox is a realistic character with flaws and doubts and beliefs that make you want to shake him and hug him and tell him he's so much more than what he or his father thought he was. Ox, the human among wolves, goes from a frightened twelve-year old boy to a heart broken twenty-six year old man, loving and learning all the way. Through Ox, we can see the power of necessity and how strong a person can become when they need to.

Wolfsong, in the easiest way I can describe a book that encompasses so much, is about a boy named Ox, who grows up next door to a family of werewolves. There are witches and power dynamics and the realization that being left behind and staying behind and different things, especially when love is concerned.

Klune's language is fantastic--he uses parallels and repetitions throughout the story, giving his words and the characters who speak them immense power. The world built within the story is fascinating, and while there was more to it than the story explored, none of it was ever confusing. Klune either explained or expected us to follow without, and it worked, because we knew as much as Ox did, and that was all we needed. The cast of characters is wide but beautifully blended. They all have fantastic chemistry, and I found myself laughing out loud at most of the dialogue they slung at each other.

I finished the book less than twenty-four hours after I got it and immediately wanted to read it again. Wolfsong was long but well paced, and the impending sense of the inevitable kept me clamoring at the pages, the thrill of the unknown driving me fervently toward what I desperately hoped was a happy ending.

Gail Carson Levine's The Lost Kingdom of Bamarre was a book I read mostly for nostalgia's sake. I grew up adoring Levine's works, and she was the reason I discovered I wanted to be a writer. My favorite novel of hers is called The Two Princesses of Bamarre, and The Lost Kingdom serves as a prequel.

Levine has ways spun fairy tales in a new, fun way, and I read all of her books when I was in elementary and middle school. Which, I think, is why I was rather disappointed with this story. I'm chalking it up to aging out of the intended age bracket, but the story felt lacking. There was an awful lot happening, and it just kind of seemed distant. I couldn't get into the story because I felt so detached by the narration and sequence of events, most of which went by without much description.

The Lost Kingdom of Bamarre is about a princess named Perry, who is stolen from her family of Bamarre natives and raised by a royal family of Lakti, the race who conquered Bamarre when their own land was overtaken by monsters. Perry grows up privileged, not knowing she is Bamarre. When she does learn, she has to overcome prejudice from herself, her adopted family, and, ultimately, the very people she might one day rule.

The idea is fantastic, and very fitting for a modern day torn apart by prejudice. But I felt the execution was lacking, and while I will still always love Levine, I think it might be time for me to put the books down and just admire them for their hand in shaping my childhood.

The Darkest Part of the Forest makes me wish I had read Holly Black's Spiderwick Chronicles growing up. Black has an excellent command of fae and magical fiction, masterfully combining beauty and terror. As someone who had a long obsession with fairies, this book was a delicious peek into the darker aspect of fae lore.

Following two siblings who live in a town entrenched in fae magic, Ben and Hazel have spent their whole lives waiting for the boy in the glass coffin to wake up. But when he does, he's nothing like what they or the town expected, and there are dark consequences looming on the horizon.

Forest could almost be considered a work of magical realism, because the Fairfolk are considered normal to the town, even if they aren't to the outside world. The book is about love--romantic, platonic, sibling, epic, all of the above. Love is created amidst the darkness and the violence, and while love needs some help to save the day, it certainly aided the triumph.

The book has a fantastic sibling dynamic, the likes of which are difficult to find in YA. Ben and Hazel clearly care for each other an enormous amount, so much so that they lie to each other under the guise of protection and admiration, when the truth is all they really wanted. Black's language is fantastic, and her syntax had me wanting to stop and underline several sentences throughout the book. The characters were real, from their flaws and hubris to their desire for good, with just enough understanding to know sometimes good is hard to find, even if you know it resides within you.

Bits of the plot happen rather quickly for my taste, but overall the pacing was nice, twists and kinks taking me on a journey I wasn't expecting, filled to the brim with dark fae magic and a forest where anything can happen, whether it is a dream or a nightmare.

Adam Silvera's They Both Die in the End starts and ends as a book about dying, but really it's a book about living.

Set in a future where death is predictable, people who are going to die receive a phone call just after midnight of their intended death day. Death-Cast can't tell them where or how they're going to die, just that it will be sometime within the next twenty-four hours. And they're never wrong.

Mateo and Rufus, strangers set to die far too young, find themselves suddenly alone on their intended death day, and reach out to one another via an app called Last Friend. What follows is a lifetime in a single day, where paranoid, terrified Mateo learns that in order to live, you have to be willing to die, and brash, angry Rufus comes to realize that sometimes life needs a little color, even if it comes a little late.

Filled with moments of somber hilarity and sentences heavy with the knowledge of the inevitable, Adam Silvera has crafted a masterpiece of metaphors, and symphony of two boys struggling to learn to live just as they're about to die. Heartbreaking and full of moments that had me choking back tears, They Both Die in the End has solidified itself as a novel to be read and recommended over and over.

Tackling the terrible, all-encompassing truth of our mortality, this book forces you to face the inevitable, but at no point did that make me want to put the book down. I didn't read the book to see how Mateo and Rufus were going to die, I read it to see how they were going to live. And it wasn't fair, to be confronted by their own mortality so young, but knowing makes the laughter and the love that much sweeter. This book has easily become one of my favorites, in all of it's heartbreaking, truly living glory. If you read nothing else from this list, read this book, and know that it's never too late to truly live.

I finished off February with Tim Federle's novel, The Great American Whatever, which in reading felt entirely like I was deciding whether I wanted to cry or laugh.

The protagonist, Quinn, is young and broken and angry and clever and funny and hurting, and this story was both his downfall and his healing. He floats through life, making decisions on the fly, or in reaction to other people, or because he spent the six months after his sister's death not making any decisions at all. A young screenwriter trapped in a story he can't figure out how to tell, Quinn is his own hero and his own villain.

I was frustrated with parts of the book, but I think that was mostly because I saw so much of my own aimlessness and desire for greatness inside Quinn. He wanted but he didn't, and it was tearing him apart. I adored Federle's descriptions, giving Quinn a hilarious outlook in a dark reality, an honesty in just seeing the world around him for both the outside and the cinematic meaning. Quinn was constantly disappointed by the people around him and by himself, because without the rose gold light of a film script, sometimes people are just people.

Littered with film references that went right over my head, The Great American Whatever took on the aftermath of grief and focused on the fact that you can never truly know a person if you're too stunned to look past the floodlights. It showed that sometimes the only person stopping you from seeing other people for who they are, from seeing yourself for who you are, is you.

February may have been a short month, but it was packed with pages, most of which I truly enjoyed, and I hope that you will too.

Keep writing, friends!

Sam

Literary Recommendation: Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda

Movie Recommendation: Black Panther (2018)

#review #literaryreview #LGBT #books #reading #list