What better way to kick off my return to the blog world {hello, unexpected two-week hiatus} than to link up with the always fabulous Amber and Rachel to share an “almost” book review. They introduced us to #collaboreads last month and today is the day we finally get to link up! The concept is simple – there are only five steps:
- Visit their blogs and see the criteria for each month’s link up.
- Go choose a book.
- READ {you get 30 whole days}.
- Write a review to link up with Amber & Rachel.
- Do it all over again next month!
The criteria for June was that the book had to be on the New York Times’ Bestseller List at the time you began reading.
Last spring, I was given a sizable Amazon gift card and decided to use to download all of the new and slightly more expensive {than my normal book purchase} books that I had been hearing all about. The Fault in our Stars was one of those. Like many of you, I immediately fell in love. So much so that I promptly used the remaining balance on my gift card to download everything else John Green had ever written. Paper Towns managed to sit on my Kindle for an entire year, unread, but because the movie adaptation is hitting cinemas this summer, it is still hanging out on the YA charts.
In part one, Margo Roth Speigelman takes Quentin {our terrified-of-everything lead character} on a seemingly spur of the moment, overnight adventure that changes his perspective on pretty much everything. In part two, Margo has disappeared and Q is desperate to find her. Did I mention he is hopelessly in love? Piecing together clues she left behind, he begins a search to find his missing friend. Finally, part three is filled with a last-minute road trip with his friends – new and old – where he hopes to finally track her down.
RIVETING. I’ll admit that when I find a book that I like to read, I’m hard pressed to put it down. Couple that with the fact I was reading this on vacation and it didn’t take much more than a few days to complete. Not only could I not wait to finish it, but I was constantly taking screen grabs {hello, iPhone Kindle app} to remember all of the funny little parts I loved later. This is one of those books that will make you feel “all the feelings”. I found myself laughing out loud, tearing up, cheering on Q and getting exceedingly frustrated with our heroine. It was twisty and turny in a not-at-all-suspenseful way and I found myself racing to the finish line. The final section of the book was definitely my favorite and where most of my virtually dog-eared pages come from. True to life, spending a few days in a minivan on the road teaches you all sorts of things about your companions and ultimately yourself.
ELEMENTS. I know that Green’s books are written for a Young Adult audience, but I’m of the opinion that a well-written book is always worth reading, no matter the intended audience. I’m sure I would have loved reading this as a high-school student, but I doubt I would have appreciated the characters or the nuances without a little more life experience. Even though it’s been over fifteen years since I walked those halls, I remember attempting to navigate those friendships and hardships and almost adulthood. At the time you feel so smart and in control of everything but reading this as an adult made me appreciate it all so much more.
The characters in this book are such misfits. A group of people who are tenuously tethered by a single character at the beginning of the book are packed into a minivan falling in love with each other by the last page. I loved the reminder that it is often the people we least expect that make the biggest impact on our lives. Margo is a bit of an enigma. She is quite the rebel and aside from a weird relationship with her parents, you don’t get much background on what makes her so angsty. Quention is adorable. He’s that geeky kid in school with the obscure band t-shirts and the almost perfect hair. You want Margo to fall in love with him SO VERY MUCH. I especially loved the accidental love story between Ben {Q’s best friend} and Lacy {one of the it-girls from Margo’s crowd}. It was so unexpected and I loved reading as they figured out their relationship. You know who I hated, though? Margo’s parents. There is a part of my 35 year old self who wants to chastise her for being irresponsible and making stupid, adolescent decisions. But there is an even bigger part of me who is cheering her on the entire time. I would hope that, as a parent, I would have handled everything about her in a completely different way. Josh and I were just talking last week about how we remember thinking our parents had it all together and actually knew what they were doing. On the flip side, we realize that they were flying by the seat of their pants and that all of their decisions were made in survival mode. I’m not sure that we know anything more than we did as 18 year old kids! I’m sure I will bungle all sorts of teachable parenting moments, but Margo’s parents missed a perfect opportunity to connect with their daughter.
ASSOCIATE. Amber asks the question – what other books / movies / television shows remind you of this book? John Green is one of those authors with a bit of a formula. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but like reading a Nicholas Sparks or a Jodi Picoult novel, you kind of know what to expect going in. After The Fault in Our Stars and Finding Alaska, I was bracing myself for devastation and what I found was a completely different kind of bittersweet. And even though the story line is so completely different, the entire time I was reading the book I couldn’t help but think of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Maybe I just have a thing for quirky, boy-meets-girl, coming of age stories.
DESIGN. Nothing bugs me more than a poorly designed book, especially when the cover isn’t pretty or the type is poorly designed. I am a classic “choose a book by its cover” reader, especially when I don’t have any other information to go on. Just this week, I lost myself in a bookstore for a few hours doing nothing but looking at pretty covers. I’m sad that I can’t comment much on the design of this book, since I read the Kindle version on my phone. I had challenged myself to read physical books that I could hold in my hand this month, but it seemed silly to purchase this one again when I already had it downloaded. I will say if I were picking up a copy of the book to keep on my shelf, I would definitely go for the original cover art. I’m never, ever a fan of the movie poster cover and this hand-lettered title is right up my typography-loving alley.
STARS. This is one of those books that I really want to give 5 stars, but then where do you go from there? I’m sure there are books that I’ve read and loved more, but this one is definitely one of my more recent favorites.
QUOTES. Maybe it’s more like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like, each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these things happen — these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places. And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable… but there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And it’s only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.
