You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.31 AVERAGE
3.31 AVERAGE
A solid 4 star book until about a little over halfway... then it was like a 2nd author started writing, and I didn't like where she took the plot. An addicting beginning with all the potential, but then wah wah wah, big let down. And Bitches Be Crazy, and not in an interesting way.
Jam has been sent to The Wooden Barn, a school for "emotionally fragile, highly intelligent" teenagers, because of "lingering effects of trauma". That trauma being Reeve, her sweet British boyfriend, who came to New Jersey as an exchange student and stole her heart. Life without Reeve has been a nightmare for Jam. He consumes her every thought, and all she wants is one more day being held by him.
Fortunately for her, Special Topics in English (a small hand-picked class of 5 people) is giving her a way back there. When she writes in her journal, she can go to a place where everything is like it used to be before her loss. But the more she visits Belzhar (as they call it), the more she starts to realize that there are truths to her life with Reeve that need confronted. And time in Belzhar is limited... what happens when they can't go back there anymore?
My Thoughts:
I read this book for book club this month, but really I've been wanting to read it since it came out. I love books about pain and loss and feeling. I love books where a character has to learn how to deal with a painful experience because it makes me feel all those feelings too. I was expecting something really deep here, but I didn't actually get what I was looking for.
It started out really well, and I read it really fast because the storyline is addicting. It begins with Jam moving into The Wooden Barn, which is a boarding school for kids dealing with issues. She gets put in a Special Topics English class with 4 other students, and they all wonder, why them?? Their teacher gives them one author to read for the entire semester, and this time it's going to be Sylvia Plath. They're also told they will write in a journal twice a week. Most of them roll their eyes about having to write in a journal, but soon learn that these journals are way more than what they seem. They allow them to go back to a time in their lives when their issue hasn't happened. For example, Casey, a classmate who was recently paralyzed, gets to go to a place where she can run. It makes them feel free from their pain, if only for a little while.
The thing that intrigued me about this book was I really wanted to know about these other 4 people in Jam's class. I wanted to know why they were all picked and where their Belzhar (a word they made up as a take on "Bell Jar") took them. I loved the magical element of the journals. The magical realism gave the book so much potential, that I just think it had a hard time living up to it. By halfway through the book, I had concluded that I didn't much like Jam. She was too into herself. Everything she felt seemed more important than what anyone else was feeling. She claimed to be friends with people, but never really seemed to ever go past saying "we're really good friends" and actually doing the things that "really good friends" do. When something happens to Sierra, Jam cries and cries to the houseparent about how it's going to affect her. Well what about the girl it's happening to?? Worry about her! It's not about YOU!
A lot of things in this book felt rushed. During Jam's second visit to Reeve, she already starts questioning things. If she laid in bed for a better part of a YEAR devastated about a death, I think it would take more than 1 visit before she would see anything but pure happiness. She has a lot more visits after that, and by the end it was hard to believe that she was holding on so tight when the questioning started so early. Another frustrating aspect was that it comes out that the relationship was very short, and while I'm not trying to tell anyone what they are entitled to feel, it was hard for me to take it seriously. Especially after everything comes out. I know young love can be intense, but 20-something days, does not an epic love story make... to me anyhow.
The rest of the book is hard to talk about without spoilers, but I want to say that I did NOT care for the ending at all. At all, at all. HEA's and couples were thrown out all over the place that didn't feel honest to the book. It also made me feel very angry towards one of the characters.
OVERALL: It's readable and entertaining, but it seemed like the author was a split personality when she wrote it. The second half doesn't match the first half for me. And the ending!!! Just no.
My Blog:
Jam has been sent to The Wooden Barn, a school for "emotionally fragile, highly intelligent" teenagers, because of "lingering effects of trauma". That trauma being Reeve, her sweet British boyfriend, who came to New Jersey as an exchange student and stole her heart. Life without Reeve has been a nightmare for Jam. He consumes her every thought, and all she wants is one more day being held by him.
Fortunately for her, Special Topics in English (a small hand-picked class of 5 people) is giving her a way back there. When she writes in her journal, she can go to a place where everything is like it used to be before her loss. But the more she visits Belzhar (as they call it), the more she starts to realize that there are truths to her life with Reeve that need confronted. And time in Belzhar is limited... what happens when they can't go back there anymore?
My Thoughts:
I read this book for book club this month, but really I've been wanting to read it since it came out. I love books about pain and loss and feeling. I love books where a character has to learn how to deal with a painful experience because it makes me feel all those feelings too. I was expecting something really deep here, but I didn't actually get what I was looking for.
It started out really well, and I read it really fast because the storyline is addicting. It begins with Jam moving into The Wooden Barn, which is a boarding school for kids dealing with issues. She gets put in a Special Topics English class with 4 other students, and they all wonder, why them?? Their teacher gives them one author to read for the entire semester, and this time it's going to be Sylvia Plath. They're also told they will write in a journal twice a week. Most of them roll their eyes about having to write in a journal, but soon learn that these journals are way more than what they seem. They allow them to go back to a time in their lives when their issue hasn't happened. For example, Casey, a classmate who was recently paralyzed, gets to go to a place where she can run. It makes them feel free from their pain, if only for a little while.
The thing that intrigued me about this book was I really wanted to know about these other 4 people in Jam's class. I wanted to know why they were all picked and where their Belzhar (a word they made up as a take on "Bell Jar") took them. I loved the magical element of the journals. The magical realism gave the book so much potential, that I just think it had a hard time living up to it. By halfway through the book, I had concluded that I didn't much like Jam. She was too into herself. Everything she felt seemed more important than what anyone else was feeling. She claimed to be friends with people, but never really seemed to ever go past saying "we're really good friends" and actually doing the things that "really good friends" do. When something happens to Sierra, Jam cries and cries to the houseparent about how it's going to affect her. Well what about the girl it's happening to?? Worry about her! It's not about YOU!
A lot of things in this book felt rushed. During Jam's second visit to Reeve, she already starts questioning things. If she laid in bed for a better part of a YEAR devastated about a death, I think it would take more than 1 visit before she would see anything but pure happiness. She has a lot more visits after that, and by the end it was hard to believe that she was holding on so tight when the questioning started so early. Another frustrating aspect was that it comes out that the relationship was very short, and while I'm not trying to tell anyone what they are entitled to feel, it was hard for me to take it seriously. Especially after everything comes out. I know young love can be intense, but 20-something days, does not an epic love story make... to me anyhow.
The rest of the book is hard to talk about without spoilers, but I want to say that I did NOT care for the ending at all. At all, at all. HEA's and couples were thrown out all over the place that didn't feel honest to the book. It also made me feel very angry towards one of the characters.
OVERALL: It's readable and entertaining, but it seemed like the author was a split personality when she wrote it. The second half doesn't match the first half for me. And the ending!!! Just no.
My Blog:
Kind of naive, but very intresting altogether, with a pinch of supernatural help.
dark
emotional
mysterious
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:
Complicated
I want to give this 3.5 stars, but decided to not steer people away with three sad stars. I finished this book yesterday, and needed a little time to mull over my final thoughts before sharing. Here are my thoughts, this book gets dark at times, and at other times I felt like the depression wasn't real enough, but then it would get so real. I suppose this can be true for some, each of us have to endure our own weird journey, and maybe that sometimes means it seems to be all over the place. This book did overall what I thought it would, yet managed to take a few weird turns. Without giving anything important away, many reviewers have said that the surreal/paranormal turn seemed to make a mockery of mental illness. Here are my thought on that, the turn is really not that fantastical, and I think we can all agree that writing sometimes is more than healing, it is a bit of an out of body experience. If one finishes the book, and get the how/why, I think that Wolitzer is really not trying to pull any punches, let alone mock anyone who suffers from any sort of mental illness. If anything, I think she draws our attention to it, and shows us that this kind of suffering is very real, and that it may look very different for each person. Overall, it was a pretty good book, with an unexpected turn. Not the greatest book I've ever read on the subject, but also worth the quick read.
A quick novel - I read it in a day. The story runs deeper than it appears at first blush. I thought the way that the journals stood in for how we process grief was very clear and powerful, and it was refreshing to not have the supernatural element become the focus. A little contrived, maybe, but like I said it almost reads like a short story with a powerful message.
What a great YA book! Tying the plot into Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar was a stroke of genius and did a great job of accentuating the feelings of the kids in the special English class. Finding out each child's traumatic story made the reader empathetic and saving Jam's complete version til the end was a stroke of genius. Highly recommend this as we all have been in similar situations sometime in our lives...
I wasn’t a huge fan. The big reveal about why Jam has a mental break was so irritating. I wanted to quit reading right then, but I was so close to finishing I had to keep going.
I liked this a lot more than I thought I would based on the reviews. I think I liked it for a lot of the reasons other people kind of hated it. Yes, the relationship between Jam and Reeve feels incredibly weird and shallow, and she seems awfully broken up over a dude she didn't know for much more than a month. And that bothered me for pretty much the whole book. However, the ending actually made sense to me, and cleared that up in a way that I found satisfying. At that point, I found her grief really relatable and thought it worked in the context of the story. Maybe I was a weird adolescent.
Belzhar has been one of those books that I've had my eye on for what feels like the longest time. I've never read The Bell Jar but having read the synopsis of this I just knew that this was going to be a back that would be right up my alley. I was hooked from the first page and I really felt that Meg Wolitzer did an amazing job of building up mystery an intrigue around the key characters. I was desperate to know each of their stories and how they ended up at The Wooden Barn. I think as well, that she managed to truly normalise issues of mental health. I find that in a lot of fiction that explores the issue, the characters are made out to be oh so fragile and 'different' to the others, but I loved that this was a group of regular teens that just needed time to grieve.
As I picked the book up to read and added it to my Goodreads shelf, I noticed that there had been some pretty negative reviews surrounding the book. I refused to read them until I'd finished, and although I agree with some of the points, I have to say that I could still totally empathise with the characters. Yes, Jam only knew Reeve for 41 days, but people can fall pretty hard in a short space of time. Not only that, but I thought that the idea of Belzhar itself was fantastic. I'm not going to go into too much detail on what Belzhar is but it most certainly made the book. It was a complete twist on the usual mental health books and I loved that it had a slightly supernatural element to it.
Not only was the plot fantastic, but I loved watching the characters grow and learning about their pasts; about how they ended up there. It was great to see so many different perspectives going on and seeing that wall of support building up. Belzhar is such an emotional but exciting book. I was so intrigued as to what was going to happen next. It's definitely difficult to put down! I urge you to red this book despite some of the negative reviews. Make your own mind up about this book. To me it was a truly wonderful read with plenty of twists and turns to keep you on your toes!
As I picked the book up to read and added it to my Goodreads shelf, I noticed that there had been some pretty negative reviews surrounding the book. I refused to read them until I'd finished, and although I agree with some of the points, I have to say that I could still totally empathise with the characters. Yes, Jam only knew Reeve for 41 days, but people can fall pretty hard in a short space of time. Not only that, but I thought that the idea of Belzhar itself was fantastic. I'm not going to go into too much detail on what Belzhar is but it most certainly made the book. It was a complete twist on the usual mental health books and I loved that it had a slightly supernatural element to it.
Not only was the plot fantastic, but I loved watching the characters grow and learning about their pasts; about how they ended up there. It was great to see so many different perspectives going on and seeing that wall of support building up. Belzhar is such an emotional but exciting book. I was so intrigued as to what was going to happen next. It's definitely difficult to put down! I urge you to red this book despite some of the negative reviews. Make your own mind up about this book. To me it was a truly wonderful read with plenty of twists and turns to keep you on your toes!