Belzhar - Meg Wolitzer

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. (Description courtesy of Goodreads)

Wolitzer's book is a mixed bag for me. I love many elements of the novel and found the concept to be quite intriguing. But there were also elements that felt disjointed, and the ending reveal left me feeling less than satisfied. I felt myself connecting to the secondary characters more than Jam. Of course, that being said, Wolitzer's storytelling is wonderful and felt myself getting very much wrapped up in the tale. Character descriptions are vivid, in some cases making dead characters more real than the real characters.
He looked like a member of one of those British punk bands from the eighties that my dad still loves, and whose albums he keeps in special plastic sleeves because he's positive they're going to be worth a lot of money someday. Once I looked up one of my dad's most prized albums on eBay and saw that someone had bid sixteen cents for it, which for some reason made me want to cry.
As Jam, Sierra, Marc, Casey, and Griffin navigate their time at The Wooden Barn and their forays into Belzhar, the group learns (Breakfast Club style) that in order to move beyond trauma and hardship, there is a certain element of acceptance of the past that must come along with recovery. I appreciated that the book was quite diverse in character representation, including a lesbian roommate, a girl with a disability, and other such individuals. 

The plot flowed smoothly, and the incorporation of stories within the larger narrative worked really well. The back stories were convincing, giving the novel a distinctive feel. Although, as I noted earlier, I was not a huge fan of the ending revelation of what really happened with Jam and Reeve (don't worry, I'm not going to spoil it!) That being said, I can appreciate what Wolitzer was attempting to accomplish with the juxtaposition of Jam's story against the trauma of the others in the group, even if I had been thinking something different might eventually be revealed.

 All in all, I liked the book and found much to love within the pages of Belzhar, and aside from some clunky moments, I found myself very much enthralled with the premise and the characterization(s). And although the comparison of varying traumas among the lead characters felt awkward and forced at times, I did find their struggles very intense and somewhat relatable.

 Recommended

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Living - Matt De La Peña

Image
The Living  recently received an Honor from the Pura Belpré committee. The award recognizes of a work which best portrays the Latino cultural experience in a work of literature for children or youth. As I was at the awards announcements, and having known people who served on the committee in the past, I was intrigued. I had read the winning title and the other honor titles, and was impressed with the choices. So here's my review of The Living : The novel begins with Shy, a young guy working for a snazzy cruise line, offering water to people on the Lido Deck of the ship to combat the heat. Everything is going pretty well until an older gentleman comes out and starts spouting of weird, disconcerting phrases: "You have seen the face of evil."Shy doesn't quite know what to think, so he moves on to a couple of ladies on the other side of the deck. Just as he's handing them their water bottles, he sees movement out of the corner of his eye and realizes the old guy h...
Read more

The Music of What Happens - Bill Konigsberg

Image
Max: Chill. Sports. Video games. Gay and not a big deal, not to him, not to his mom, not to his buddies. And a secret: An encounter with an older kid that makes it hard to breathe, one that he doesn't want to think about, ever. Jordan: The opposite of chill. Poetry. His "wives" and the Chandler Mall. Never been kissed and searching for Mr. Right, who probably won't like him anyway. And a secret: A spiraling out of control mother, and the knowledge that he's the only one who can keep the family from falling apart. Over the course of one summer, two boys will have to face their biggest fears and decide what they're willing to risk -- to get the thing they want the most. This is a phenomenal book, in my humble opinion. There aren't too many books dealing with male sexual abuse, particularly in YA. Sex and sexuality are messy parts of young adulthood, but what this book does really well is discuss consent and the ways in which physical cues can be misinte...
Read more

Girls Like Us - Gail Giles

Image
I have now gone out and made sure that I have all of the books longlisted for the National Book Award. I read and reviewed a number of these previously, so now I have five left to read and review. This is one of those five (but would I expect anything less from the fabulous team at Candlewick?) Girls Like Us  is a unique novel in a number of respects, most notably in the fact that both protagonists are identified (and self-identified) as mentally disabled in some way. Biddy has a learning disability that she was born with, while Quincy is a young girl who is disabled due to the fact that her mother's boyfriend hit her in the head with a brick, disfiguring her and damaging her brain. Once the two girls graduate from school, they move into a house together, becoming caregivers for both each other and an older woman, Elizabeth. The two must rely on each other for comfort, knowledge, and emotional strength, and Elizabeth manages to help them along the way. While I had moments of wo...
Read more