Wonder

Written By R.J. Palacio
Original Publication Date: 2012

Rating: 4 Stars

Favorite Quotes:

"the universe takes care of all its birds."

"Everyone deserves a standing ovation because we all overcometh the world. "

Review:

What do you do when you see someone with a deformity, a missing limb, a physical disorder, or really, anything that's considered "not normal"?  Do you stare?  Do you look away?  Do you glance away and then look back, pretending that everything is "normal" and you're not bothered?   Do you tease and mock?  Do you cringe?  Do you feel badly that you're looking at that person differently?  We all do it.  When we're confronted with a person's appearance that is less-than-average, we panic.  We don't know what to do.  We don't know how to approach that person because we can only assume that their less-than-average appearance makes them a less-than-average kind of person that needs to be treated differently.  It's a twisted part of our human nature.

August (Auggie) Pullman was born with a facial deformity, though that's an understatement of grand proportions.  He's looked at differently every day.  People treat him like a porcelain doll.  People even scream, when startled by his appearance.  He says he's used to it, but can anyone ever really be used to that sort of treatment?

Up until the fifth grade he's been kept out of school.  His mother has homeschooled him because of the multitude of surgeries that he goes through to make his face more functional, firstly, and slightly more average, secondly.  For the fifth grade, he gets sent to Beecher Prep, a private school in the city.

Remember what it's like being the new kid in a new school?  Remember how you looked at the new kid in your school?  Remember how they were treated?  Now imagine going through that every single day for a year, because every time you meet someone new, you are always considered the freak: always.

Wonder is a remarkable story of growth.  The perspective switches between Auggie, his sister, and various other friends of the kids.  The growth can be seen in all the perspectives, by all the kids.  This is not only the story of how one deformed kid is grown to be accepted by his peers, but the story of how a group of kids grows to accept the strange and different in their worlds.

Mini Review: The Bell Jar

Written By Sylvia Plath
Original Publication Date: 1963

Rating: 4 Stars

Let me see if I can phrase this correctly.  I found The Bell Jar to be both an easy read and a difficult one.  Language-wise, the book was easy to read, it flowed; Plath has this way of giving you an entire picture with just a simple few words.  However, where I found it difficult to read was the bluntness and the truthfulness of the decent into a world inundated with dark thoughts and depression.  To some extent, especially when we're in our late teens, early twenties, I think this is something that everyone struggles with.  Trying to find your place in the world is a hard, scary, thing to do and some of us handle it better than others.  Plath encapsulated this in her vaguely autobiographical novel.  She was really writing about the "Quarter-Life Crisis" 30 or 40 years before the phrase came into vogue, and she did so brilliantly and truthfully.

Man in the Empty Suit

Written By Sean Ferrell
Original Publication Date: 2013

Rating: 4 Stars

Book Notes:

I received this ebook for free from the publisher, via NetGalley.

I wish I'd finished it yesterday (the 5th of February), as that was it's publication date, but I'd gone away for the weekend and didn't have any time to read.

2%

"Port Authority Terminal - redundant stairs, inexplicable turns, and filthy dead ends ..."

Yes!  Yes!  and Yes!  Gods, I hate that place.

9%

So many paradoxes.  Brain.  Ouch.

100%

Beautiful last passage, but, wait?  what?  I want more.

Review:

Image source: www.reclusland.com

My brain feels something like this after reading this novel: full of explosions.  The Paradox Problem has always been an issue when a good author takes on time travel.  Sean Ferrell not only takes on the Paradox Problem, but throws it in your face.  The book has a little bit of a Doctor Who in Pompeii feel to it.

A time traveler, whose first name is never given (correct?  Unless I missed it somewhere) decides, when he's 19, that every year on his birthday, he is going to travel to 100 years after the date of his birth and get drunk with all past and future versions of himself.  Everything changes on his 39th birthday when he is The Suit, that year, he finds the Body.  The Body appears to be 6 months to a year older than he is.  How could this be?  There are Elders in attendance of the party, and Youngsters that are far younger than the Inventor.  On top of all this, there is a mysterious woman who has been invited by some version of himself and he's never noticed her before.  What has happened!?  Can he possibly save the Body's life and the life of this woman?!

Wait, What?  Yes, it really is just that confusing and terrifyingly awesome and wonderful.  I'm writing this review and still trying to figure out exactly what happened in this novel.  Any book I can finish and then immediately decide it deserves a re-read because everything loops into everything else earns some serious points in my book.  

There are rules that the versions of himself are supposed to follow at the party, to prevent Paradoxes.  Of course, he doesn't always follow these rules, because you can only watch yourself break your nose so many times before you try to stop it.  Every choice The Suit makes that doesn't follow the expected timeline of the Elders, untethers more and more of them, freeing them to make their own choices and to change their own lives.  As is put succinctly quite a few times, "Fuck the rules."  The more I think about it, the more I'm deciding that "Fuck the rules," is really the point of the novel.  Rules are made to be broken, and we can only truly be free when we follow our hearts and own ideals, rather than listening to how other people expect things to go.

My favorite quote of the novel is the last few sentences, and I'll share them with you, because I really don't believe it gives anything of the plot away.

"The future vibrated with uncertainty.  I had failed.  I had ignorance.  I had hope."

I do think this requires a re-read in 6 months, after I've mulled it over for a while.  I need to let my brain soak in it before I start again.  I think I'll take even more away from it, the second time around.

In summary:  Wait, what?!  Oh!  Sweet!  Awesome.

Extras

Written By Scott Westerfeld
Original Publication Date: 2007

Rating: 4 Stars

Book Notes:

Seems that I don't write a lot of page-specific notes when I'm at my boyfriend's place (especially when I'm not on my Kindle).  My youngest sister bought me this book because I'd read her copies of the first three novels in the series, Uglies, Pretties, and Specials but she had lost this one!  I read those before I had this blog - see their review on my Goodreads Account.

I was very amused by the dedication of this novel: "To everyone who wrote to me to reveal the secret definition of the word 'trilogy'."

Review:

This takes place some years after Tally takes down society, and vows to protect the Earth.  

Aya is 15 in what is today's Japan.  Her parents won't allow her to start having surge until she is 16.  Aya thinks they wish that it were still the Prettytime.  Her rank in the city is far too low for her to afford any, anyway.  Her feed is read by almost nobody, so her facerank is too low to receive merits for the writing in it.  All she wants is to get famous and stop being a self-named-ugly.  She found a story to kick in a secret clique that despises fame and wants to stay off of the city feeds. Her story about a secret clique turns into a story about city-killing missiles and the end of the world.  Someone doesn't want her story to get out and Aya is forced to go on the run with the famous Tally Youngblood.

Basically, this is a city run by how many people follow your Twitter and Facebook feeds! Eek!  I don't know about you, but that sounds terrifying. We self-rank ourselves enough because of these twisted social networks, we don't need economy based on it as well!

It seems a common review of this series that people liked it less and less as the novels went on.  Somehow I found myself in the minority and enjoying these novels more and more.  They were all four star books, but were I  to rank them, I liked Extras more than Specials more than Pretties more than Uglies.  I think that for me it was the widening world more than anything else that did it for me.  While the stories were all fairly similar, it made me think of what each new division of the culture was doing in the previous book.  What were the Specials up to in Pretties and Uglies?  What were the Crims up to in Uglies?  What have Tally and friends been doing since Specials?  Yes, there's a formula, and yes, I can see how the books were predictable.  But you know what?  I thought they were fun to read.  I found the issues they addressed to be important enough, that the predictability was forgivable.  I found the writing flowed well enough that I simply didn't have time to be bored.