Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

I heard of Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino from Susie on Sarah's Bookshelves (the podcast).

The premise is that Adina is an alien and she sends and receives faxes from her home planet. But don't let the sci-fi element fool you. This is a book about coming of age, about struggling through, about grief, about life, about death. The alien slant is interesting in its own way, but if you're not into sci-fi books, this still might appeal to you because it's not the main theme. It was heartbreakingly sad and (spoiler here), the dog dies. I'm just warning you. 

I liked this a lot. I felt like it resonated with me and made me sad and hopeful all at the same time. 4/5 stars

Lines of note:

It is September 1979 and Americans are obsessed with Star Wars, a civil war movie set in space. Bounding to the stage after hearing her name, a Price is Right contestant loses her tube top and reveals herself to a shocked Burbank audience. (page 3)

A civil war movie set in space. Ha! Also, that poor lady on The Price is Right. It's immortalized on the internet to this very day. 

Their routine changes so frequently they don't need much language (page 19)

Sometimes my husband and I don't even talk. We just know what's going to happen. 

...being physically present in one place while your mind is in another is loneliness. Loneliness can make you hang with phonies to distract yourself. (page 82)

Interesting. I'm not sure that's how I define it, but to each their own, I guess. 

It must be the opposite of homesickness, to return home to find it more beautiful, to return and still feel distance. (page 83)

One of the hardest things is figuring out where home is (your childhood home? where you sleep now? your favorite aunt's house?) and figuring out how to react when it's not longer the place you're most comfortable. 

For the first time, Adina feels that no one on Earth or even beyond understands her. (page 113)

I have to admit that this line made me guffaw. Teenagers, you know?

She answers the phone, keeps the candy jar filled, and monitors the bathroom key. Ten minutes out of her twenty-minute training was candy-jar related. (page 177)

LOLOLOL. My boss keeps a candy-jar filled in our office and I swear to you that half her job is candy-jar related. When she goes on vacation for a week and it gets low, there are COMPLAINTS.

(page 180)

This passage about the geese made me laugh and think of Lisa and her boys, particularly the "It's big in the Midwest." 

Things I looked up: 

Pando (page 157) - the world's largest tree, a quaking Aspen, in Utah

parp (page 183) - to make a sound like that made by a car horn

double Cancer (page 194) - honestly, astrology posts make me cry - I have no idea what these means

Eames birds (page 222) - it's a carved bird; there's a history there, but it also made me want to cry with boredom

Hat mentions (why hats?):

The man chuckles at the women, bundled in hats and scarves. (page 99)

On the ride, Dominic pulls a bong, a toilet paper roll, and two tinfoil hats from his back seat..."And the hat protects you from mind control from other planets." (page 151)

Adina arranges the hat on her head. (page 151)

"You can keep the hat," Dominic says, and she says, "What hat?" (page 154)

"...I like your hat." (page 256)

The fancy-cheap brocade boxes, the caps like faux-gold hats. (page 279)

Cocktails on the lawn, groping hat-in-wind. (page 287)

*****************

Are you a double Cancer? Do you even know what that means?

A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Tahereh Mafi

A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Tahereh Mafi is a young adult bildungsroman.  A year after 9/11, Shirin, a Muslim teenager who wears a scarf, has been shunted from school to school her entire life and now the victim of racism and microaggressions daily, practically hourly. She spends most of her time attempting to ignore how horrible people are, listening to music in earbuds that her hijab covers, and practicing breakdancing with her older brother.  She's cynical, angry, and a typical teenage girl.  Enter Ocean, her assigned lab partner. They have a tense relationship at first, but eventually their relationship builds into something more. 

This was definitely a memorable book in many ways. The main character's rage felt so real. She's facing all kinds of Islamophobia and hate being directed at her for absolutely nothing she's done.  Her parents are loving parents, but clueless in many ways.  She's close to her brother, but that relationship isn't perfect by any means.  I really felt like Shirin's wall of invincibility was well-earned and well-maintained, but it also created a wall between the character and the reader that was hard to get over. It was hard to get invested in a character who was not invested in anyone or anything except existence, but that was the point and it was well made.

But the romance. It just...there was already so much THERE to deal with. Islamophobia, generational differences with parents, questions of identity. And then there was this romance subplot. I'm guessing that young women everywhere swooned over this book and since they are the intended audience for this book and I'm not, maybe that's fine. But I just didn't want to have to deal with Ocean's stupid white people problems and lack of a spine. I didn't want this book to be about the problems of an interracial relationship (they exist! and we should talk about them! - but Shirin was already dealing with her own shit and I just didn't feel like this subplot added anything) and actually detracted from Shirin's real problems.  

Anyway, it's a great book! Fun to read!  I just didn't love the romantic plot. But I guess I don't have to.

The Outsiders by SE Hinton

The Outsiders by SE Hinton is a classic in young adult literature. I'm not sure how I got through school without reading it, but I read about ten pages and immediately filed it under what I would call a "boy book." Like A Separate Peace, The Catcher in the Rye, and most Gary Paulsen books, these are books that feature male characters and it's as if women don't exist at all. As a young reader, I found these books to be almost unreadable and would avoid them if at all possible.

And I really kept putting off this one, too.  I read the first ten pages and put the book down for a day. Read another ten pages and put it down for another day. Rinse and repeat. It took me more than a week to read this relatively slim volume because I just didn't want to read it.

It tells the story of a group of thugs young men who are referred to and call themselves greasers and their rivalry with another group of thugs young men.  The youngest greaser is our main character whose name (on his birth certificate was we read over and over and over again) is Ponyboy.  We follow Ponyboy as things, already bad with his parents recently dying and his oldest brother desperately trying to keep the three brothers together, get worse and worse.

It's a book for a certain reader.  That reader is not me.

I was never a kid who settled issues with violence. I was never a kid who got in "with a bad crowd." I was an outsider, sure, but not an outsider like these kids.  And while I understand that the lives of the greasers are hard, I also thought that they didn't make things any easier for themselves. And the whole teenage boy angst thing just got really old quickly for me. And I think it would have gotten old for me when I was a teenager (don't even get me started on Holden Caulfield). I know that what I'm writing is probably sacrilegious and upsetting to some, but The Outsiders is not going to the top of my books to be recommended to teenage boys list.

The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon

The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon is magical. I haven't enjoyed a YA novel this much since my first reads of Sarah Dessen's Just Listen and Dreamland. Natasha and Daniel meet each other on a singular day in each of their lives. We learn about them as we learn about the people around them. It is a multiple POV book done exceptionally well.  The characters are funny, but real. 

This book tackles what I see as two big issues. The first is that it's hard to be a child of immigrants in the United States. There are pressures put on you from all sides that non-immigrant children don't deal with - fitting in culturally in multiple cultures and responsibility placed on your shoulders from parents who really want what's best for you, but may not agree on what "best" is - and this book tackles this topic with both of our characters.  The other issue is that racism is alive and well and not just racism that involves white people. Daniel's Korean family has issues with him dating a black girl and Natasha's family doesn't know exactly what to do with Daniel.  It delves into racism in an interesting, nuanced way that felt like a lived world.

The major criticism I have of this book is that it really is a love at first sight book. If you are not a fan of the overly romantic version of love that says you will fall in love with someone if you ask them some questions, you might not find yourself loving this book as much as I did.  However, the book actually grapples with the very question of whether or not instalove is real or even healthy through the thoughts of Natasha, a scientifically-minded soul whose parents have a relatively unhappy marriage despite love at first sight, so I don't actually feel like this portion of the novel was hand waving over the fact that real relationships are not formed in  ten hours.

So, this is a strong thumbs up from me.