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4.09 AVERAGE
4.09 AVERAGE
3.5-4.0 stars, I can't decide. Some parts were seriously touching and moving. Other parts left me thinking, "Really? Would that really happen?" It brought me back to the 80s when AIDS was so new and omnipresent in the news. The book did make me think, and that is worth 3 stars at least.
Very well written novel about losing someone dear and finding a way through it. I really enjoyed reading this one. June is a character that will stay with me for a long time.
Somewhat charming at times, also overdone. It would be nice to see less young-adult style spelling out of exactly how each action should be interpreted and what should be thought of the characters. I had some lounging around to do this weekend, and this book was a decent way to spend some of that time.
A well-written book about relationships and discovering what's important in life. I loved the character of June, as well as the picture that was painted of her Uncle Finn's character.
adventurous
emotional
funny
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This book really pulled me in and touched my heart. The main character is just a few years older than me, so many of the story's elements (set in the 1980's) felt familiar. It deals with the subject of AIDS when it was so unknown and, therefore, extra terrifying, which I remember from my childhood. The story weaves through the complexity of family and romantic relationships in that crazy time between childhood and adulthood. I especially loved the complicated confusing, changing relationship with the sister. It was so similar to my sister and mine when we were kids and teens! was a lovely, heartbreaking story and I enjoyed it immensely.
I loved this book...wish my book club was reading it because there's so much to talk about. her portrayal of June and greta's relationship had great depth as well as what it's like to be 14. I loved her comment in the conversation with her at the end of the book about her choice to leave Greta's character a bit of a mystery. I was frustrated while reading it, thinking there was something going on with the drama teacher, but can now appreciate why she purposefully chose to not dive into it.
This book is pathetic. It's pathetic in the manner that I, as a queer person, exist in it solely to provide pathos for the cishets and other conformists. It's pathetic in how queer culture is valued only when it submits to the hegemony of Euro/Neo-Euro culture. It's pathetic because it uses and abuses and murders individuals without ever deconstructing heteronormativity or ableness or the capitalism that won't care for an artist while they're alive and marginalized but it is more than happy to gloat over their corpse and works once they're dead. It's a story that doesn't fit Shaw's prescription of "Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself," so why so many adults are reading it and praising it, I don't know. I came to this expecting a human story to be told. What I found was brown face, jealousy used as an excuse for inflicting debilitating ostracization, and a pathetic brat that blundered through life and her self made woes as much as the rest of her family did. True, she was very sad at the end, but sad is always better than dead, and there is nothing cathartic about watching some idiot cishet kid indulge enough in the queer side of things to eventually rejoin "normal" non queer society and leave only a couple bodies behind. Read this to a child, and I guarantee you, they won't grow up to be a good human being. Rather, they'll simply expect that minorities use up their lives performing for the majority, stigmatizing when appropriate. A good lesson if you want children to maintain the status quo; a bad one if you want them to be critically compassionate.
I have a friend who stopped watching a TV show when the one gay man of color character got AIDS. I may have picked up this book during Pride Month, but AIDS isn't queer. Once again, I have been failed by a community that looks more like my sister, who laughed in my face when I described how hard it was to get to know other people while openly queer and mentally ill, than it looks like me. What the community love was the fridging of one, than another queer character, far from their realm of queer solidarity, trapped in the saccharine nonsense of familial relations that only considered part of their humanity as worthy of being "family" with. This is a children's book, so you can't tell me that there will be no ramifications to showing a child that the only time the politically victimized should be considered valuable is when their shit can be auctioned off with a high and sentimental value. Coupled with the fact that June is quite possibly the most boring character with the most nonsensical relationships with some of the flattest characters ever written, and you have an author who saw social justice, thought it would be a good marketing ploy if all the people were rendered into safe and easily palatable caricatures of themselves, and then made bank off of it. I wouldn't give this to a young person, as not only is there a good chance that they're coming into their noncishet own, I'm hardly going to enable their potential oppressors. A queer kid's life is not some cursed fate tacked onto the cishet mainstream as some sort of short lived butterfly that has to die for the sake of heteronormative domestic bliss. Again, all this could've been avoided if this story had been a queer one, not a sob story that ends with the dangerous elements safely and narratively euthanized. If you're not going to do our work, you don't get the right to our stories.
This work isn't as odiously minority porned as "Me Before You", but it has the same traits of a more powerful individual economically benefiting from the stories of the less powerful many and expecting to get some kind of reward for it. It's 2018, and people are still shoving things like this work down my throat out of the sheer privilege of not having to engage with the life as a whole day in and day out. As such, I was all out to pick up 'Annabel' after this, but now, the next queer book I pick up needs to be by an actual queer person, as who knows what sorts of fuckery I'll encounter by following the recommendations of the cishet masses. And this is the type of the work the world pronounces to be 'young adult'. Disgusting.
I have a friend who stopped watching a TV show when the one gay man of color character got AIDS. I may have picked up this book during Pride Month, but AIDS isn't queer. Once again, I have been failed by a community that looks more like my sister, who laughed in my face when I described how hard it was to get to know other people while openly queer and mentally ill, than it looks like me. What the community love was the fridging of one, than another queer character, far from their realm of queer solidarity, trapped in the saccharine nonsense of familial relations that only considered part of their humanity as worthy of being "family" with. This is a children's book, so you can't tell me that there will be no ramifications to showing a child that the only time the politically victimized should be considered valuable is when their shit can be auctioned off with a high and sentimental value. Coupled with the fact that June is quite possibly the most boring character with the most nonsensical relationships with some of the flattest characters ever written, and you have an author who saw social justice, thought it would be a good marketing ploy if all the people were rendered into safe and easily palatable caricatures of themselves, and then made bank off of it. I wouldn't give this to a young person, as not only is there a good chance that they're coming into their noncishet own, I'm hardly going to enable their potential oppressors. A queer kid's life is not some cursed fate tacked onto the cishet mainstream as some sort of short lived butterfly that has to die for the sake of heteronormative domestic bliss. Again, all this could've been avoided if this story had been a queer one, not a sob story that ends with the dangerous elements safely and narratively euthanized. If you're not going to do our work, you don't get the right to our stories.
This work isn't as odiously minority porned as "Me Before You", but it has the same traits of a more powerful individual economically benefiting from the stories of the less powerful many and expecting to get some kind of reward for it. It's 2018, and people are still shoving things like this work down my throat out of the sheer privilege of not having to engage with the life as a whole day in and day out. As such, I was all out to pick up 'Annabel' after this, but now, the next queer book I pick up needs to be by an actual queer person, as who knows what sorts of fuckery I'll encounter by following the recommendations of the cishet masses. And this is the type of the work the world pronounces to be 'young adult'. Disgusting.