February Review

I'll be honest, I write these reviews with the assumption that no one will read them. And that's okay, because it makes me unafraid to be honest.

But, that begs the question: if no one is reading the, why am I writing them? WHy not just read the books and be done with it? It would certainly be easier than finding the time to punch out my thoughts on something I'm supposed to be doing for fun.

But whether or not someone reads my words, I'm a writer. Creation doesn't require viewership to exist. I don't need an audience to make something, because sometimes I just have to do it for me.

I read to read and write to write, and those two things happen to overlap in this instances, even if I'm the only one reading what I write.

Firestarter by Tara Sim

Me when I started this book: I'm not gonna cry, there's no way

Me, the last thirty pages of this book: *almost too many tears*

This books kind of wrecked me. Not on the same level as, say, Song of Achilles wrecked me, but there was a solid chunk of time where I was convinced I was going to have to go to Tara Sim's house and cry on her doorstep. But I don't. I mean, maybe I still do, because this was the best ending this series could conceivably have and she still managed to make it (spoiler alert) happy.

I don't really know how to write a review of this book by itself, except to say that it jumped to Extreme very quickly and was totally worth it. I started the series thinking it was going to be all fun and magic and time. I should've known better, because there was someone literally bombing clock towers in the first book. I should've known it would be bloody and intense. I think I just didn't expect it to be This bloody and intense. I was afraid for a very long time that there wasn't going to be a happy ending. And even when I got to the ending, part of me was still very sad. Because sacrifice and loss can't be magically fixed. Sometimes things come back, but they come back different. Sometimes they don't come back at all.

Firestarter is a burst of flame and a raging storm, and I am so very glad that I read this series to its conclusion.

Sim surprised me in several places, drawing parallels and poetic comparisons that had me stopping in my tracks, trying to see the magic she wove through time without my even noticing. Brilliantly done. She captured the spirit of love and grief and handed it to us knowing we could handle it, even if we didn't think we could.

I'll keep this short, because I don't want to give too much away and I've already written about the other two books in this trilogy. So don't stop after book one. Read all three and live.

I look forward to seeing what Sim does next, because something tells me it will be something magical.

Symptoms of Being Human by Jeff Garvis

I guess I should start off by saying this book needed to come with a fuck ton of trigger warnings. So, as my review will contain references to some of the stuff that happens, spoilers (and warnings) ahead.

I really appreciated the representation in this book. Genderfluid and non-binary characters are even less represented than asexual characters. All of you should know by now that I actively seek out books that feature LGBT+ characters, and when this one was recommended to me, I knew I had to read it. And for the majority of the book, I was sucked into Riley's story, wanting them to succeed in their quest to befriend Bec and Solo, to succeed in writing their blog, to come out as genderfluid to their parents.

Every aspect of Riley's life was heavily scrutinized, as both a teenager and as the child of a congressman. It's hard to live your life as your true self when the fate of your father's career depends on the majority of a rather conservative country liking him.

Riley's anxiety was severe, and while my own is incredibly mild, I still felt myself leaning into Riley's descriptions, feeling that finally someone was able to articulate how it feels. Garvis' descriptions of anxiety and body dysphoria both enlightened and included me. I was consuming Riley's story, afraid for them, hopeful for them, tearing through the pages into the late hours of the night.

And then the sexual assault happened.

It wasn't described in terrifying detail, in fact it was left intentionally vague, but that didn't matter. It happened.

I'm not sure why I have such a visceral reaction to media that includes sexual assault. I finished this book the night before writing this review, and my stomach is still in knots today, the feeling lingering with me. I've never been sexually assaulted, so please don't read into this, but I think it's one of those things that I am so gut-wrenchingly, paralyzingly afraid of that even the thought of it, or the consumption of it in any media, kind of destroys me.

And I'm not begrudging the author for including it. One in thirty transgender and non-gender conforming youths face violence of a sexual nature, and those are only the cases that are reported. This is something that happens, and my feelings as a cisgender girl don't matter in the face of this greater tragedy.

It threw me, but it was more important than that. Often times male writers will use sexual assault as a cheat sheet for female pain. A quick backstory builder, an easy way to invoke audience sympathy and a way to skate around creating someone with a personality beyond 'hurt.' And that's not fair to real life survivors or the characters being created, because women are more than fodder for violence. Women are more than the things that hurt them.

But Riley isn't a girl. They aren't a boy. They're genderfluid, and as such, this sexual assault felt violating in a different way. I don't know if I'm even qualified to dig deeper into it, or if I could physically do it, but it's important. This whole book was incredibly important.

And the assault is a very small part of the book. I know a big chunk of my review just focused on this aspect of the book, but the attack and the subsequent emotional response is really just a part of Riley's story. They are not defined by this attack. They are not defined by the gender binary, by the way their father's constituents view them, by the way high school bullies react to something they don't want to understand.

Riley is defined by their courage to speak out despite the danger, despite the anger and the anxiety. Riley is defined by their patience and desire to help others, even when they feel like they can't help themselves. Riley is defined by the identity that they, and only they, can choose. Riley is Riley, and that's all they really ever wanted to be.

This book is Important, and I think everyone should read it.

You Know Me Well by Nina LaCour and David Levithan

I have to start this review by saying that I adore Nina LaCour. David Levithan and I have a love/hate relationship, but this one was great, so he's back in my good graces.

This was a damn good WLW and MLM collaboration and stuff like this needs to happen more often. I live for friendships between a boy and a girl that don't become romance. Even better, they can't become romance because they boy and girl are gay and in love with other people.

I started this book thinking it would be about a wild night in the city trying to find a way to cope with love or lack thereof. Instead, it was about the aftermath of the night. The day after seeking love. The journey to finding self acceptance, to understanding what it means to know ourselves and know each other. It was about friendship that grows in one night and stays.

Kate and Mark don't know each other at the beginning of this book. They're just two lost souls trying to convince themselves that they deserve to be loved.

Mark, out and proud and all american attractive, has been in love with his best friend, Ryan, for years. Ryan, who is sarcastic and bookish. Ryan, who is pushing Mark outside his shell, pushing Mark to try something crazy, something daring. Ryan, who is still in the closet. Ryan, who wants to fall in love with someone who isn't Mark.

Kate graduates next week and is heading to UCLA to pursue art. She's good, but she doesn't believe that. She doesn't believe that good things can happen, and if they seem like they will she runs away. Avoids it. Sabotages herself. She's afraid of her own potential, afraid that she has no potential. She's in love with a girl she doesn't know but is supposed to meet, and instead she finds herself somewhere else, in a place where she can't be hurt by what's not there.

And then Mark and Kate meet. Mark reeling from heartbreak and Kate terrified of the way things move forward, and together they find a friendship unlike anything either of them have ever had. And they also discover that the friendships they do already have are more than they seem. That sometimes trying to trade something good for something better isn't really better.

Ryan doesn't love Mark. He loves him as a friend, as a best friend, and that has to be enough. It's still something good. Hell, it might even be something better.

Kate has to stop running away. She loves Violet, she loves her friends, she loves her art. And now it's time to love herself, and to see that even if the future keeps coming for us, she can match it step for step. Running away only makes time run faster.

"Today is finally here. We are no longer what we were. We are now what we're going to be."

LaCour and Leviathan are a powerful team. This book is anxious and true and raw and asks the reader to look, to really look, at who we are and who we love. At the kind of love we want for ourselves.

But that's what LaCour and Leviathan do. No matter what I read from them, I always finish with this sense of yearning for self discovery and acceptance. And that's kind of the LGBT experience. It's universal, and these books describe it so beautifully. So many sentences, so many uncomprehendingly deep ideas, reach out of the pages and snag your heart in their fist, until you can feel Kate's anxiety, feel Mark's heartbreak in your chest, before you realize it's your own.

This book gripped my heart, and that's a cliche, but whatever. This is my book review, and I'm going to spend it saying that while this book is about falling in love (with other people, with yourself) it's also about the kind of love that builds friendships. And that maybe that's the most important kind of love.

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

This book was. Strange. Half an alien mystery, half a social commentary on how fame affects morality. I spent most of the book in awe of how meta and self-aware it was.

April May is likable in her honesty and frustrating in anxiety. She's well aware of her faults, but her refusal to process things or correct her actions to deal with said faults in any way kind of nullified her knowing about them. She sabotaged relationships and herself, while also creating an incredibly composed internet persona. Her self control was simultaneously in tatters and incredible, but April was a study in conflict and contrast, a person who became a brand. And that was interesting to read, from the perspective of someone who doesn't know a lot about internet fame but enough to understand the corrupting nature of power.

Her honesty about fame and attention was wild. It's like walking toward a burning building knowing very well that it's on fire and will hurt you, but going anyway. And, spoiler alert, that's kind of what happened.

The other characters felt a little bit more background than normal background characters, but that's probably because they were trapped in April's orbit, included in her story for their proximity and relative importance. The story wouldn't have happened without them, but they were peripheral, seemingly only important when they were doing something for April.

I'll be honest, I was way more interested in the Carl storyline than the commentary on fame, but both aspects were really interesting. The book wasn't what I was expecting, but I enjoyed it, even if it felt a little incomplete. The overall mystery is unsolved, but that was intentional. April talked about giving people what they want by holding something back, that way they'd always be looking to you for more. Hank Green understands meta work almost too well.

Now, the most fascinating part of this story was the Carls and The Dream, and I feel like I can't get too into that, for fear of spoilers. There's not a great way to explain most of this story, as it revolves around what seems like an unsolvable mystery and an unanswered ending. Plus, telling you anything about Carl feels like a betrayal to April, because she tells the story very well.

Overall, I don't really know what I was expecting when I started reading Hank Green's first book. Maybe I expected something like John Green's books, maybe I expected the opposite. And while Hank certainly isn't his brother, there was still a little bit of that identifiable, unmistakable Nerdfighter flair. And that was fun.

So, in short, I don't know how to recommend or really review this book, so this was a mess, sorry. Read it or don't, it was Wild.

First and Then by Emma Mills

I have to be brutally honest, I wrote the review before this (for An Absolutely Remarkable Thing) like seven hours ago during my lunch break, and then, in the time between writing that one and this one, I both started and finished First and Then. Partly because reading a book cover to cover is in fact my idea of an Awesome Saturday Night, but also because I adore Emma Mills' books.

I read This Adventure Ends a couple months ago and fell in love with it. First and Then is no different.

Mills' characters are honest and real in their mediocrity. Daunted by the future and flirting on the outskirts of their own life, Mills' protagonists remind me of what is was like when everything that happened was the biggest deal in the world, no matter how small. Trying to figure out life and self and what those things mean in the context of friendship and the future. The introspection, the drama. God I love Emma Mills.

Devon is the heroine for this novel, and along the way we collect absolutely memorable characters. Mills is great at writing a phenomenal supporting cast of human beings I would love to interact with or straight up already know. Foster and Ezra and Lindsay and Jordan are all Fantastic. I don't miss high school, but I do miss the close proximity to people I care about.

Every so often I feel like I may have missed my chance at a sweeping high school romance, and then I read books like this a realize that I didn't miss, it just would have never existed for me the way it does in these books. I love stories like this because they're grounded in reality but so much better than anything I've encountered.

A modern adaption of sorts of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, First and Then tackles all the important pride and judgment of a regency novel, while also making me, for the first time probably ever, care about football. Mills' writing perfectly captures the soul of a somewhat selfish and judgmental teenage girl, brimming with Lizzie Bennett spirit, and makes her tell a story where there aren't any Willoughbys, there aren't any Wickhams. There are just people who make decisions and live in bubbles that sometimes just need to be popped.

I don't think I'm even properly articulating everything I want to say about this book because I read all of it in like five hours and didn't even give myself time to process before immediately grabbing my laptop and screaming to the internet how much I love reading books like this. It's not even the love story part, I don't know that I could really put my finger on it. Mills writes in a way I connect with on some transcendent level, and maybe that's where I'll leave it.

Well, I mean, I'll leave it there and then I'll go buy her other book. Because transcendance.

I went from David Levithan and Nina LaCour to Hank Green to Emma Mills, which was honestly a weird hoop jump through with a lot of relevant YA authors, and my brain might be a little bit broken. February was very short and I managed to cram a lot of words into it. No regrets, though. It was totally worth it.

Deacon Locke Went To Prom by Brian Katcher

This book was a surprise, because I didn't expect to finish it before the end of February. But here we are, ending the month on a downswing.

I feel a little bad because this is the second Brian Katcher book I've read and also really did not enjoy. But I really tried to give him another chance to impress me, and it didn't work.

His characters are consistently whiny and judgy, to the point where I briefly considered the fact that maybe all men are just Like That and I hate it. In the end, I think I just don't like the way Katcher characterizes the men in his stories. Deacon was marginally better than the last main character, but still a tool. He was constantly critiquing the people around him (including the looks of nearly every girl that crossed his path) and holding himself on a pedestal. When he started to like a girl, he then put her on a pedestal instead of actually trying to get to know her, and then promptly pulled a shitty jealous boy move by trying to fight her guy friend even after she told him nothing would ever happen. Would it hurt to have a little trust in this girl you think is a goddess even though you don't really know anything about her?

Katcher really played up the 'handsome but he doesn't know it' schtick for Deacon that accompanied his fame, but it felt too forced. The only notable thing about Deacon was that he was very tall and didn't like to apologize to his friends for his shitty behavior. I was so often frustrated with Deacon for putting his foot in his mouth and then refusing to apologize or deal with it, even when he knew he was being rude. It was exhausting reading in his perspective, because everything about him was very unlikable. In fact, his grandmother, Jean, was the only really likable aspect about him.

Jean was the only person in the book who actually felt kind of real, and even then she was very dependent on how Deacon was feeling/what Deacon was doing. And I understand that as the main character, that's Deacon's role, but I couldn't help but feel like the women were kind of glossed over to make way for how their actions made Deacon feel.

The main plot line felt incredibly unrealistic. And that's not really fair of me to say, because with fiction there's the whole suspension of disbelief thing that is automatically included, but this time around it felt like Katcher wasn't even really trying. The progression of events was Absolutely Wild and not at all where I thought the book would go. A bit of false advertising, based on the summary, and it felt a little off the rails. The last Katcher book did too, so maybe that's just a thing he does? I don't want to judge the author for his work, especially since it really just wasn't my thing, but still. A review is a review, even if nobody reads it.

Deacon's past sounded wild though, and honestly I'd have much rather read about his childhood growing up with a weird, traveling father than dealing with his whiny, judgy teenage self.

I should probably justs top trying to read Brian Katcher books at this point, and stick with Emma Mills or Nina LaCour. I almost ended February on such a high swing too.

So, there you have it folks. Reviews written for books I wanted to read, without any themes or overarcing ideas. Because I do this for me, especially if it means reading six books in twenty-eight days.

Keep writing!

Sam

Literary Recommendation: The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzie Lee

Cinematic Recommendation: The Umbrella Academy (2019) dir. Andrew Bernstein, Peter Hoar, Ellen Kuras, Stephen Surjik, and Jeremy Webb

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