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introvertinterrupted's Reviews (1.08k)
I gave this book 3.5 stars.
Mitali Perkins tells a story that is rife with tension, pain, and the joy of finding peace of mind once you heal from the pain that life can cause you. This novel deals with sexual assault, intercultural adoption, sex trafficking, and abandonment and trauma issues from dealing with all the above. While confronting these things, Perkins make sure to allow bright spots to appeAr the characters lives where they exist just as teenagers would without the pain that their life experiences may bring.
I highly suggest this book if you don’t mind reading a raw and unfiltered story that has religious undertones.
Mitali Perkins tells a story that is rife with tension, pain, and the joy of finding peace of mind once you heal from the pain that life can cause you. This novel deals with sexual assault, intercultural adoption, sex trafficking, and abandonment and trauma issues from dealing with all the above. While confronting these things, Perkins make sure to allow bright spots to appeAr the characters lives where they exist just as teenagers would without the pain that their life experiences may bring.
I highly suggest this book if you don’t mind reading a raw and unfiltered story that has religious undertones.
I gave this book a solid 3.5 stars.
Something that I find so interesting about stories that deal with illnesses is that they seem to skirt the issues of being sick and the "perks" that terminally ill people seem to receive. However, John Green stands stoically in his authorship and calls us all out on our bull****.
Both, Augustus and Hazel are made into optimistic if not angsty teenagers who are speeding toward oblivion furiously reaching out for a lifeline to keep them tethered to this world. While, I respect Green's writing style and story, I found that the characters themselves are not entirely new to literature.Hazel becomes the symbolic character that gets left behind once her boyfriend gets spirited off (no pun intended) to the after world and Augustus is the character who dies before his time. Together, their story while cute in some spots and heart-wrenchingly sad in others is not one that was fresh enough for me to fall down in total awe upon it's ending.
Yet, I can say that I was enticed by the idea that two people could go on this sort of journey together to excavate a story's ending from their favorite author half-way across the world. Green produces this adventure in a way that's so realistic that I found myself seriously thunderstruck when I got to the scene where Peter Van Houten denies these two cancer-ridden teenagers their last grand "wish." At this point in the story, I got into the idea that maybe what people like Augustus and Hazel really need is not so much our pity for them but, our understanding that they are really just individuals who are just like their "healthy" contemporaries who are searching for life's answers. Therefore, the one thing that seriously struck me in this novel is that people like Augustus and Hazel are no different than you or I. Like us, their death is inevitable. However, unlike us, they have a ballpark figure of when their final days are going to draw to a close.
Overall, I found the book to be a interesting and funny read with a light romance laced throughout the plot. I would recommend the book to others as a conversation starter but, not as a book that needs to be continuously read to understand it.
Something that I find so interesting about stories that deal with illnesses is that they seem to skirt the issues of being sick and the "perks" that terminally ill people seem to receive. However, John Green stands stoically in his authorship and calls us all out on our bull****.
Both, Augustus and Hazel are made into optimistic if not angsty teenagers who are speeding toward oblivion furiously reaching out for a lifeline to keep them tethered to this world. While, I respect Green's writing style and story, I found that the characters themselves are not entirely new to literature.
Yet, I can say that I was enticed by the idea that two people could go on this sort of journey together to excavate a story's ending from their favorite author half-way across the world. Green produces this adventure in a way that's so realistic that I found myself seriously thunderstruck when I got to the scene where Peter Van Houten denies these two cancer-ridden teenagers their last grand "wish."
Overall, I found the book to be a interesting and funny read with a light romance laced throughout the plot. I would recommend the book to others as a conversation starter but, not as a book that needs to be continuously read to understand it.
As the descendant of American Chattel Slavery, I am many generations removed from my ancestral home. There is no one who can remember who we were or where we came from before my ancestors landed on the shores of Charleston, South Carolina chained up in the hull of a ship. Sadly, there is no one who can really tell us how our forefather and foremothers ended up on those ships to begin with. I am much like the lost mer-people that Solomon’s main character, Yetu, has the task with “reminding” about their history.
Read the rest of my review on my blog, IntrovertInterrupted where I you can learn about howJames deCaires Taylor's underwater sculpture exhibit, Vicissitudes, and the music group, Clipping, relates to Rivers Solomon's book!
Read the rest of my review on my blog, IntrovertInterrupted where I you can learn about howJames deCaires Taylor's underwater sculpture exhibit, Vicissitudes, and the music group, Clipping, relates to Rivers Solomon's book!