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3.98 AVERAGE
3.98 AVERAGE
What a cute book!! Love a book with a child’s perspective.
Knowing this was a children's book, I wasn't expecting such a complicated and touching story. I really enjoyed this book. It felt so raw and real. I really felt for Alex. This book provides such a realistic and moving depiction of what it would be like to be a child experiencing these things. I would recommend this ook to both young readers and adults.
Listen to the audiobook if you have a chance, it really gives life to the story.
Beautiful, honest, and hopeful. This is a truly human journey that expresses profound longings with the sharpness and clarity of the non-cynical eyes of youth. Read it slowly and meditate on this journey. We should all be more like Alex.
A sweet book, which I am rereading from my tween years. This book is incredibly nostalgic, featuring characteristically lonely, desolate places in the western USA that have a particular kind of earthy magic to them (even places like Las Vegas, where a city that only really was made to function as an extravagant stopover exists in the middle of endless eerie desert). Alex's voice is charming, and so honest and childlike and sometimes trying to comprehend the big things in life with unrelenting excitement and persistence not yet worn out of him by time and society. He's funny, insightful, vulnerable, clever and loving, and the best future astrophysicist I could imagine. In one of my favourite passages, he talks about his favourite 4D shape, the tesseract, and how we can only see the tesseract's 3D shadow to perceive it; very astutely, he then goes on to exclaim that the big feelings in life, love, fear and others, are tesseracts, or perhaps even the same tesseract, but our words are only ever 3D or 2D- 'words are shadows too'. He puts into words the fundamental failing of words in such a beautifully Alex way, and I think that's what's so special about this book; it's someone with their own voice phrasing the unphrasable through it.
Told via recordings, this book worked beautifully as an audiobook. I was very pleasantly surprised by how deep this story became.
I really enjoyed this as an audio book. It took the story to another level.
When I heard that the story was told in a running stream of consciousness style, I wasn't sure it would work for me. Surprisingly, it did! Alex was a interesting character, and with that narration choice readers were able to clearly see the world through his point of view (limited of course, by his 11 year old sensibilities).
What didn't work as well for me were some of the plot points and what happened didn't quite feel true to how the characters would act.
Overall, pretty good though, I definitely agree with the others that this would make a good read a like for fans of Counting By 7s.
What didn't work as well for me were some of the plot points and what happened didn't quite feel true to how the characters would act.
Overall, pretty good though, I definitely agree with the others that this would make a good read a like for fans of Counting By 7s.
Reading (listening?) to Alex's voice was so delightful and charming and poignant. A child making sense of adults with accuracy spurred by innocence. Recommend.