A review by brogan7
Alterations by Ray Xu

adventurous emotional funny sad medium-paced

4.0

This is a story about being young and not quite fitting in to the world, that hard age when some kids want to be "cool" and don't treat other kids very well, that time when you just want to play and escape and responsibilities feel burdensome and beyond your understanding.
I think it's a great book to teach about empathy, Kevin the MC is so relatable and his family, complicated and strewn with stress fractures, feels real.
I'm not convinced that the intergenerational conflict would be as caring as it is portrayed to be in the book, I think often times the elder generation(s) really can't relate to what kids are going through here, now--where his parents and grandmother emigrated from China and faced such hardships there, I don't know how much tolerance they would have for Kevin's process
and I don't know if their love would be spoken of or understood in the way it was at the end of the book.
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