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cooksbooks05's review
5.0
Feeling simultaneous hope and despair after reading this book. It will stick with me I’m sure.
andante's review
5.0
A book full of heart and longing. A desperate quest for a better life and understanding of oneself.
amdame1's review
3.0
Juan is an excellent basketball player but he's struggling in school. Then he hurts his ankle really badly when he and his friend JD are running away from the cops at a party. His life just seems to get worse and worse, and there does not seem to be any way out. His friend JD is facing similar trials with dead ends and seemingly no where to turn.
This is a pretty bleak, but sadly realistic, I suppose, look at the lives of brown boys in El Paso, TX. It's a debut novel - and reads like one. This author has promise and I hope he keeps writing. #WNDB
There were typographical errors throughout, but I had an ARC so that was to be expected.
This is a pretty bleak, but sadly realistic, I suppose, look at the lives of brown boys in El Paso, TX. It's a debut novel - and reads like one. This author has promise and I hope he keeps writing. #WNDB
There were typographical errors throughout, but I had an ARC so that was to be expected.
theresidentbookworm's review
3.0
I love RivetedLit's 25 Days of Free Reads in December. I look forward to it every year because it gives me the chance to read some YA I haven't heard of or otherwise wouldn't have read. Barely Missing Everything wasn't on my TBR, and so I'm glad I got the chance to read it.
Barely Missing Everything is very much in the vein of Jason Reynold's All American Boys. It centers around three characters: Juan, a teenage Mexican-American basketball player, his best friend and budding filmmaker J.D., and Juan's mom, Fabi, who had him at sixteen. The novel bounces between these three characters. I always enjoying multiple points of view, and I like that Barely Missing Everything gives equal time and space to Fabi. Usually, YA novels don't spend much time with the parents, but I liked that Fabi was included. Her characterization, her fears and dreams and thoughts, both make the novel more nuance and help inform Juan's character as well.
Mendez is a master of characterization. I felt like Juan, J.D., and Fabi were all nuanced and complicated in ways that were different and interesting. Even when I felt frustrated with them (*cough* Juan and J.D. *cough*), I deeply sympathized with them. I wanted good things for them. However, I do wish the novel were better paced. It felt slow and steady most of the novel, and then it picked up a little too quickly at the end.
And the ending? Oh, that ending. I did not see Juan dying coming. It felt like a punch in the gut. I wanted him to live. I wanted him to get to go to college. Maybe, though, that was the point: the injustice of what happened to Juan. It's a special kind of devastating.
If you enjoyed All American Boys, I would give Barely Missing Everything a read.
Barely Missing Everything is very much in the vein of Jason Reynold's All American Boys. It centers around three characters: Juan, a teenage Mexican-American basketball player, his best friend and budding filmmaker J.D., and Juan's mom, Fabi, who had him at sixteen. The novel bounces between these three characters. I always enjoying multiple points of view, and I like that Barely Missing Everything gives equal time and space to Fabi. Usually, YA novels don't spend much time with the parents, but I liked that Fabi was included. Her characterization, her fears and dreams and thoughts, both make the novel more nuance and help inform Juan's character as well.
Mendez is a master of characterization. I felt like Juan, J.D., and Fabi were all nuanced and complicated in ways that were different and interesting. Even when I felt frustrated with them (*cough* Juan and J.D. *cough*), I deeply sympathized with them. I wanted good things for them. However, I do wish the novel were better paced. It felt slow and steady most of the novel, and then it picked up a little too quickly at the end.
And the ending? Oh, that ending.
If you enjoyed All American Boys, I would give Barely Missing Everything a read.
bredmgz214's review
5.0
I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Books like this ... the representation always pulls me in. As a kid, there was never enough books, or any thing with the Mexican rep, so now that it is slowly becoming more, I gravitate towards it. This book had a lot of it. It was real life and truth. The struggles and bs that Juan were going through and that ending though. It just was such a good book that had me hooked and wanting more like it.
literarymarvel's review
4.0
Sadly I’m not much into basketball, so a lot of the story held no interest to me. But I did like the characters and their relationships with one another. As well as the family drama.
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