Thursday, December 19

Weekender Books August - November - YOUNG ADULT



Here is the long promised second post of the August-November books I wanted to write about. The books I have selected deal with the themes of guilt, loss, redemption, mental health, friendship, death and love. They all tell the themes through very intense experiences: losing someone close by suicide, getting killed in a car accident and being in a mental institution.

Here they are, in no particular order other than the one I read them in:




Girl Running, Boy Falling - Kate Gordon

The Shiny Guys - Doug MacLeod

Before I Fall - Lauren Oliver




Girl Running, Boy Falling 

by Kate Gordon (Rhiza Press, 2018)

This story is told from the perspective of sixteen-year-old Therese. She's called Tiger by her aunt, with whom she lives in a small town on Tasmania. To her friends she is Resey. The boy she loves calls her Champ. She’s a lot of different things for a lot of different people and she's fine with it. 

Therese deals with more loss and abandonment in her young life than most - her parents both have left her behind while embarking on their own adventures and new lives without her and Therese's only 'contact' are her letters about her life (I'm not even sure if she's sending them off), which made for a sad start.

But when the boy she loves falls without warning and commits suicide, the sense of abandonment and loss is overwhelming and Therese has to find ways to cope with this new kind of grieving for a life lost, once again. 
Girl Running, Boy Falling is so much more than a story about a girl and boy. It raises the questions of the impact of suicide on those left behind and the way the brain and the heart can or cannot deal with that kind of trauma.The book took me on a journey of life's emotions - grief, heartbreak, loss, despair and love, told in a beautiful language. A deeply moving book that will stay with me.

🌺🌻🌼🍁🌸
Recommendation: A book that's hard to put down. Best read with a cup of tea, a box of tissues and a lit candle for all the loved ones lost.


The Shiny Guys 
By Doug MacLeod (Penguin Books 2012)

Fifteen-year old Colin gets visits from the shiny guys. They don't speak but Colin reads their thoughts. They've come in his life to stay because they want him to pay for the terrible things he's done. Particularly his lying about the disappearance of his beloved younger sister, Briony, who fell victim to an unspeakable crime.

Colin is committed to a psychiatric ward after he takes an overdose of his mother's sleeping pills, sometime after the horrible event shook the family apart. He makes friends in this new world of his. 

The story is set in the mid 1980s, around the time when I read Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Kafka's Metamorphosis (the latter, unsurprisingly, appears in the story) and this story was very evocative of those older stories without replicating them, but adding a new voice.  

While the overall story about the crossing of the fine line between not telling the truth, the oppression of guilt and the loss of a sense of reality was very dark and confronting, there are some funny interactions between Colin and the other patients, which underpin the idea of closed wards being a haven, a place where everyone's free to forge their own reality without judgement from the other patients, at least. 

Writing about various mental illnesses is not an easy task. This book managed to present different forms of mental coping mechanisms to survive their own reality through the characters of Colin, Mango and Anthea. The book's style mirrors these differences and nuances and demands the reader's full attention to detail, as it weaves in and out of reality, dream-like landscapes and SciFi worlds. A challenging but equally rewarding book.

🐜🐾🐾🐾😮
Recommendation: An equally challenging and rewarding book that invites a look into mental illness as a coping mechanism and escape into an alternative reality. 


Before I Fall 
By Lauren Oliver (Hodder 2010)

Samantha is a popular high school senior in a small town in Connecticut who dies in a terrible accident. She gets to re-live variations of her last day with the benefit of hindsight and a good dose of self-reflection. We learn that Samantha, also narrator of the story, is part of the worst group of bullies in her school, where she is more of the average follower, than the leader.

The What If scenario is compelling: wouldn't it be great if we got a second chance to undo our mistakes or better never commit them in the first place?

Samantha gets seven takes. Each repeated day starts in the morning until she realises that by making even the slightest changes towards kindness, she may steer events towards a more empathetic environment and ultimately a better version of herself.

The book made me think about cultural discrepancies between the reader and the author like no other fiction book before. It was clearly written for an American audience, first and foremost, and there's nothing wrong with that. Although I have visited the States and had American friends growing up (and yes, I do watch American movies, too), I was taken aback by the accepted culture of 'mean girls' as part of the high school experience here. It took me a while to get into this world of spite and meanness beyond reason and I really couldn't relate to any of the characters -- bullies and victims alike. That's not to say that I didn't grow up with the experience of bully-culture or that my children grew up in a bully-free environment. What got to me is more the impression that being that kind of average follower (personified in Samantha's character), is the accepted norm that no one challenges as being wrong -- neither her peers, teachers or parents. I also don't know if this kind of story endorses certain stereotypes about American teenagers.

Despite this, I think the author's choice to give voice to the bully is brave and the way she paves the path to a type of redemption in this hypothetical setting is - interesting. It's the reason why I don't regret reading Before I Fall to the end.

😔😑😐😧😯
Recommendation: Prepare for very stereotypical American-teen voices and a string of settings that taste of old cliches. If you're a fan of Hollywood films (but don't expect a happy ending) with drama, bitching and backstabbing on the menu but also a lot of entertaining ideas - this book will tick the boxes.



>>Have you read any of these books? Let me know.<<

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