Echo: a MUST Listen

    Do your ears and heart a favor and GO GET THIS AUDIOBOOK! You can thank me later. I don't even remember why I chose to listen to this book rather than read it. I think it was mostly because it was the only kidlit title from my TBR that was available on Libby at the time and I needed an audiobook while I folded laundry or something. I am telling you right now, listening to Echo is the only way to go! The print book just cannot compare!

    Echo starts with a fairy tale about a boy named Otto and a harmonica. Throughout the rest of the book this harmonica proves to carry some magic within it as it comes in contact with three different children when they need it most. Friedrich is living in Germany just as Hitler is taking power. His world is changing and he must learn to stand for what he believes in. A few years later we meet Mikey who lives in Pennsylvania as an orphan with his little brother. All they want is to belong in a loving family. A few years more and readers are introduced to Ivey. She must cope with moving to a new town and being sent to the Annex School just because she is not white all while her older brother is fighting in the war. Each of these characters have a talent for music and the harmonica finds them at just the right time.

    You're probably wondering what is so wonderful about a bunch of kids and a harmonica. Well, the best part about listening to this book is that there is a different narrator for each of the main characters AND there are instrumental sections. There are whole parts where you get to hear the songs played on the harmonica. I just can't imagine this book having the same effect on me if I had only read it in print. The audio was so well done! And it makes all the difference at the very end...I got chills listening to it!

    Apart from a completely magical listening experience, this story is just plain beautiful. I loved and cared for each character. Their struggles were so real and although I didn't live during these time periods, I personally felt the pain of injustice as if it were happening to me. I loved the little bit of fairy tale that was woven throughout the book. There's a little rhyme that makes its way full circle and it's something I would love to make into a print and put on my wall.

    You know when you're nearing the very end of a book and you think the next page is your last but then there's one more and then one more and you're like "ugh, this author has killed so many good endings!"? Well for one of the first times ever in my reading life I kept thinking it was the end, but instead it kept going and it only got better! Each "ending" was a better ending than the last and when it actually was the ending I almost started applauding!

    I can't wait for the next teen, or family, or really anybody at work who asks me for a recommendation. I will very enthusiastically suggest require they read listen to this book. It was truly enjoyable and what all reading experiences should be.

5/5 Stars
 

Station Eleven or: Eerie Dystopian that Could Actually Happen

    I've been wanting to read this book for a long while and finally got the chance to for my book club. It's often classified as science fiction which I get, but what's different about this novel is that everything is 100% realistic. It could literally happen tomorrow and that's what makes reading this such a nail biter.

   Arthur Leander is a world famous actor who collapses from a heart attack while performing King Lear on stage. His death is not a spoiler, I promise, it happens on page 1. From there readers follow his life (through flashbacks) and the lives of those who crossed paths with him at one point or another. The big catch is that the night of Arthur's death is also the night the world ends. 99% of the population is wiped out. And soon after that anything powered by electricity, gas, or battery dies too. No more air travel, internet, government, or hospitals. We're given details of life 20 years before and after the collapse and bits and pieces in between to form a narrative about art, survival, and civilization.

    So, that summary is kind of vague, but I don't want to give anything away. There's quite a few characters to keep track of and it would be better for you to just go read the book rather than me typing out a long summary of each of them! After finishing I realized how there wasn't ever really a main character because the story was told from multiple points-of-view. You know I love stories told from multiple POVs!
 
    This book wasn't what I was expecting when I heard it was dystopian mainly because of all of the flashbacks to before the collapse. There was just as much happening in the pre-collapse narrative as the post-collapse. It made the story more relatable, whereas so much dystopian fiction feels disconnected from my own world. Mandel certainly has a talent for making ordinary characters interesting to read about. There often wasn't anything special about the people in this story, but she had a way of making me sympathize with them and wanting to know what happened to them. I especially loved they way they were all interconnected with one another. It was like this web that spread over decades tying everyone together even if they never knew it.

    Like I said above, the disturbing part about this book is that it could happen to us at any moment. Nothing Mandel wrote about was out of the realm of possibility in the world as we know it. In our book club we talked about what skills we would have to offer if we survived what the characters here did. How horrifying would it be to never see your family again, trying to move on while assuming they are probably dead. Would we stay where we are or try to move somewhere more promising? So many questions are raised by the time I finished the book that I can't even begin to answer. I don't even want to think about answering most of them, it's too scary!

    There is so much more I could talk about but I think I'm going to leave it at that...hopefully this review is the little taste you need to bite into the book as a whole. Overall, a must read! Although it ends on a hopeful note, it left me a little depressed, so you've been warned!

4/5 Stars

The Underground Railroad and How It Stressed Me Out

    I don't want to make light of the events described in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, but gosh, I feel like I need to watch several episodes of Friends to recover after this book. I finally picked it up when it was selected as a September title for the Diverse Books Club (@diversebooksclub on Instagram...check it out!). I'm always up for some great historical fiction, but reading this makes me feel the same way I feel when I watch movies like Deepwater Horizon or The Impossible. I think to myself, "Holy cow. I would not survive this. I cannot imagine the pain and suffering. I don't even want to think about it!" Stories like these have me holding my head in my hands the whole time because they're true. They really happened. I can't tell myself, "Well it's sad but it's just a story."

    The Underground Railroad follows Cora from childhood on a cotton plantation in Georgia through her young adult life as she tries to escape slavery and find freedom in the North. She meets friends and enemies along the way, gets captured more than a few times, and can't begin to know what it means to live a carefree life. She is aided by the the underground railroad, a network of allies and abolitionists working to help free slaves. Whitehead, however, takes it a step further and imagines the underground railroad as a literal train track underground that helps fugitives flee their owners. The story is told mainly through Cora's point of view (third person) but occasionally breaks to secondary characters.

    Like I said above, this book brought the 19th century South to life. So much so that I was practically groaning at the torture and punishments slaves were put through. I just cannot imagine treating human beings like they're property, animals. It's something I knew happened, but this Whitehead opened my eyes to it in a whole new way. There were so many heart-wrenching scenes throughout this book. I mean every time I thought maybe Cora could be happy, something horrible happened. I just wanted her to reunite with her mother, fall in love, have her own children, learn to read for crying out loud! I just wanted her to be able to relax! This was the most compelling part of the story: following Cora's journey. I had to know where she was going to end up.

    What I wasn't crazy about was the character development, meaning I didn't think there was much of it. Although we follow Cora from birth to young womanhood, I don't feel like I ever got to know her really well. I was certainly rooting for her, but it wasn't because I really liked her as a character (although I didn't dislike her), it was because she (and the other slaves) didn't deserve to be treated way she was. And if the main character wasn't completely fleshed out, you can imagine the secondary characters weren't either. I think the chapters from the other points of view were supposed to help with that but I found some of these more confusing or distracting than necessary or interesting (except for the one at the end...you'll know it when you get there!) I guess I found all of the characters to be rather cold and unapproachable (can that be a thing for characters in a book??).

    The other aspect of this book that bothered me was the timeline. There was a lot of back and forth between childhood and adulthood, past and present. The book definitely did not follow chronological order, which it wouldn't absolutely have to except I often had to reread sections to reorient myself about where I was in relation to where was a paragraph ago. I think Whitehead's goal here was to reveal certain things at certain times. He would often work backward as a way of introducing a new setting, but I found it a little jarring and disjointed.

    Overall, the need to know what was going to happen to Cora outweighed the things I didn't like about Whitehead's style choices. This was a great read, but definitely not because it gave me warm, fuzzy feelings. Instead, it made me angry about the injustices that took place in the past and the injustices that are still happening in the present. America may have made progress since slavery in the South, but we still have a long way left to go. I think that is Whitehead's real motive behind writing this story and he certainly drove it home for me.

3.5/5 Stars

 

This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

    I'm going to come right out and say that this book made me uncomfortable. It was beautifully written and had me totally engrossed the entire time, but I was certainly challenged while reading it. I picked this book up because there was so much buzz about it and I don't like being out of the book loop. I knew what the main idea was, but the story tackled it a little differently than I was expecting.

    Penn and Rosie are doing their best to raise their five children. Without really meaning to, they carry one big secret. Their daughter, Poppy, is not like the other little girls around her. She has to go into the bathroom to change into her pajamas at slumber parties and her parents spend hours on the internet researching hormone blockers. This is because Poppy used to be Claude. The story follows the family over a decade as they navigate life and learn about acceptance of others and oneself.

    Transgender issues and rights are not topics I am very familiar with and honestly, not ones I intentionally seek to learn more about. But I realize stories like this one are reality for people and families around me. And I really believe this gave me a perspective I wouldn't have had otherwise. Although this is only one story and there are many more unique stories out there, I feel my understanding of this challenging, but timely topic has been enhanced.

    I suppose the hardest thing for me to grasp about this story was how easily Rosie and Penn accepted the idea of Claude becoming Poppy. I don't pretend to know how to raise kids, or know what it means to love one's child unconditionally, but there was so little resistance coming from the parents which didn't strike me as very realistic. In general, I thought the majority of characters in this book were very accepting of Poppy's transformation. Clearly there are scenes that stand out to refute that claim, but I mean overall, and especially at the end (sorry, slight spoiler), everyone is just pretty much hunky dory about everything. It's not that I wish bad things for Poppy's character, I just had an impression that things for her and her parents would take a lot more time, explaining, fighting, pushing against the system, etc.

    No matter how I feel about the content though, Frankel is, without a doubt, an excellent writer. My favorite parts of this story were all the bits and pieces of the family throughout the years. How Rosie and Penn fell in love, "watching" the older boys grow up, Grumwald and Princess Stephanie (and how they came full circle!), Poppy and Aggie tapping on each other's windows and more. The real heart of this book is family and love and I can't argue with that.

 4/5 Stars