Musing: Halloween week 2014!

happy halloween week!

brought to you by

c.j. 

and

google+ halloweenify 

Musing: I suck at being a blogger right now

musing 

My posts have been eaten by grad school.  

Things just got real.  

I have reviews in my head, they're just not making it to paper right now.  Sorry for the wait on contest winners too.  I will force myself to do those this weekend. 

Enjoy this relevant (and much cleverer) post instead. 

Cheers

CJ 

Mini Review: Belzhar by Meg Wolitzer

review

                 book

title:  Belzhar author:  Meg Wolitzer pages: 608 format: Paperback isbn/asin: 978-1481422345 buy it: Amazon  Goodreads  B&N rating: 3/5 [in the genre] or 6/10 [all books I’ve ever read]. recommended for:  People who enjoyed Anatomy of a Misfit by Andrea Porter, The Breakfast Club, or boarding schools.   will i read this author again?:  Yes.   will i continue the series?:  N/A  My Ratings Explained

If life were fair, Jam Gallahue would still be at home in New Jersey with her sweet British boyfriend, Reeve Maxfield. She’d be watching old comedy sketches with him. She’d be kissing him in the library stacks.

She certainly wouldn’t be at The Wooden Barn, a therapeutic boarding school in rural Vermont, living with a weird roommate, and signed up for an exclusive, mysterious class called Special Topics in English.

But life isn’t fair, and Reeve Maxfield is dead.

Until a journal-writing assignment leads Jam to Belzhar, where the untainted past is restored, and Jam can feel Reeve’s arms around her once again. But there are hidden truths on Jam’s path to reclaim her loss.

From New York Times bestselling author Meg Wolitzer comes a breathtaking and surprising story about first love, deep sorrow, and the power of acceptance.

the basics

I found that I loved this book less than I had expected; then by the end, I appreciated it more than I had been.  It's a divisive book.  I loved the twist and found it absolutely believable in the context of mental health.  But I know that same twist will make it difficult for some readers to empathize with Jam.  In my mind, Jam was very relatable.  She's an extreme, but an extreme of something that we've all felt.  Really, I thought the plot was well paced and clever.  The characters and writing disappointed me.  The writing was simplistic and often overly straightforward or overly repetitive.  The side characters didn't have distinguishable voices and, for the most part, received very little substantive attention.  It was like The Breakfast Club without the deep connections I felt to those characters.  In Belzhar, I felt like Jam was real and the others were sort of types.  So for most of the book, I found my interest flagging.  Then the twist happened, and I appreciated everything so much more.  But it's unfortunate that the specialness of the book hinges on the twist, because it was relatively average until then.  Still, if you enjoy boarding school reads, it's a quick and enjoyable book.