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rebecca_oneil 's review for:
How to Say Goodbye in Robot
by Natalie Standiford
Beatrice Szabo, who dubs herself Robot Girl after her mother repeatedly calls her heartless, moves to Baltimore with her family at the most difficult time to change high schools: senior year. Her mother has been acting unstable, her father is focused on his new job as a professor, and Beatrice just hopes that her new school’s alphabetical seating places her next to a nice girl with friend potential. Instead, she ends up by Jonah Tate, a strange, pale boy with a chip on his shoulder. They strike up a tenuous friendship in spite of the other students’ taunts that Jonah is a “Ghost Boy” who hasn’t been right since a car accident killed his mother and his disabled twin brother, Matthew. As two outsiders trying to survive in dysfunctional families, Beatrice and Jonah's friendship quickly grows intense but stays platonic, much to the confusion of their peers and parents. When Jonah receives a Christmas card from his supposedly-dead brother and Beatrice pledges to help find him, the resulting chain of events tests everything Beatrice and Jonah know about friendship and each other.
This book does an excellent job capturing the angst and uncertainty that can pervade high-school friendships, especially as the protagonists head toward graduation and the unknown future. Characters act like legitimate high school seniors, drinking beer at parties, dating, and occasionally cursing. Readers who seek quirky characters and real-life locations will enjoy Beatrice and Jonah's mutual love of late-night radio call-in shows, oddball photography projects, and Baltimore bookstores and dives. The pink cover will most likely attract girls, but teens of both genders who appreciate a truly unconventional love story will want to know about this book.
One reviewer predicted it could become a cult classic like [b:The perks of being a wallflower|22628|The Perks of Being a Wallflower|Stephen Chbosky|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167352178s/22628.jpg|2236198], and I'd recommend it to fans of that book.
Favorite quotes:
"Tom was okay, but we were just pretending to like each other, hoping that eventually, if we pretended hard enough, it would turn real."
"But unless someone mentioned shoes, all you thought about was what he was saying [on the radio]. What the world inside his head must look like."
"Sure, he [George of "It's a Wonderful Life"] loves his wife and kids, in that helpless way people love their families. He's stuck with them, so he makes the best of a bad situation. He's a hero because he makes something good out of a life he doesn't want. I'd like to be able to do that. I hope it's something you can learn."
"The few sunny days were cold and windy and fluorescent in a glaring, turn-that-light-down way, exposing the bare trees and brown grass and other wounds of winter no one was ready to see."
"He sent out a people-repellent vibe, a kind of Off! for humans."
"On the other hand, this was a chance to do something real, something that mattered. After all the years of reading and writing and adding and subtracting, schoolwork and swimming lessons and learning how to behave, I was ready to make a big, dramatic gesture. Wasn't this what it meant to be an adult -- taking action?"
"Those anti-depressants Dr. Huang gave her were some kind of miracle drug. I considered giving them a try, but I didn't think they'd work for me. I had no cause to be happy. I felt sad with good reason, and it wouldn't be right to mess with that feeling. I thought I ought to just stay sad for a while."
This book does an excellent job capturing the angst and uncertainty that can pervade high-school friendships, especially as the protagonists head toward graduation and the unknown future. Characters act like legitimate high school seniors, drinking beer at parties, dating, and occasionally cursing. Readers who seek quirky characters and real-life locations will enjoy Beatrice and Jonah's mutual love of late-night radio call-in shows, oddball photography projects, and Baltimore bookstores and dives. The pink cover will most likely attract girls, but teens of both genders who appreciate a truly unconventional love story will want to know about this book.
One reviewer predicted it could become a cult classic like [b:The perks of being a wallflower|22628|The Perks of Being a Wallflower|Stephen Chbosky|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167352178s/22628.jpg|2236198], and I'd recommend it to fans of that book.
Favorite quotes:
"Tom was okay, but we were just pretending to like each other, hoping that eventually, if we pretended hard enough, it would turn real."
"But unless someone mentioned shoes, all you thought about was what he was saying [on the radio]. What the world inside his head must look like."
"Sure, he [George of "It's a Wonderful Life"] loves his wife and kids, in that helpless way people love their families. He's stuck with them, so he makes the best of a bad situation. He's a hero because he makes something good out of a life he doesn't want. I'd like to be able to do that. I hope it's something you can learn."
"The few sunny days were cold and windy and fluorescent in a glaring, turn-that-light-down way, exposing the bare trees and brown grass and other wounds of winter no one was ready to see."
"He sent out a people-repellent vibe, a kind of Off! for humans."
"On the other hand, this was a chance to do something real, something that mattered. After all the years of reading and writing and adding and subtracting, schoolwork and swimming lessons and learning how to behave, I was ready to make a big, dramatic gesture. Wasn't this what it meant to be an adult -- taking action?"
"Those anti-depressants Dr. Huang gave her were some kind of miracle drug. I considered giving them a try, but I didn't think they'd work for me. I had no cause to be happy. I felt sad with good reason, and it wouldn't be right to mess with that feeling. I thought I ought to just stay sad for a while."