Louisa
Just great ♥️ OR
It's hard to imagine a life like Tara's. This is what makes literature interesting; stories that transport you in faraway places with very different people. But Tara's is real. She said that while she was writing her story, she wasn't sure if she was writing the account of estrangement from her family or her path to education. It was both, because they were mutually exclusive. Her radical Mormon survivalist parents raised her and her brothers in a farm in Idaho without a birth certificate, doctors, or education. Tara was supposed to be homeschooled, but she wasnt. Her father believed in government conspiracies and the End of Days. Her mother treated near-fatal injuries with essential oils. As Tara went from that environment to attending BYU and then earning a PhD from Cambridge, she slowly learned to believe in her own truth, to make her own choices. But it was a very different world her family still lived in, one that she had to give up. This is not one to be missed!
Read this for the second time and realised I had judged it quite poorly the first. It's interesting, well-written, holistic in its approach, and very very important because it makes some key yet generally unacknowledged points about depression that can also apply to mental illnesses in general. Apart from putting the reader in his shoes (William Styron was very severely depressed for a period of his later life), he highlights that depression is difficult to cure because of the idiosyncratic nature of the disease, and because the brain is still largely a mystery to science. Also, mental illnesses are illnesses even though they are often treated as behavioural choices of patients unwilling to make the extra effort at life. Though gloomy at times, it ends on a very optimistic note. Highly recommended!
I don't read YA but this is Hank Green's debut and there are few humans I do not know personally but adore as much as the Green brothers. My conclusion is that this is a very valuable and essential book for the genre (and indeed all genres): with personal insight and tons of wisdom Hank addresses the nature and power of the social internet, it's potential, the difficult reality of social media fame, and so much more. A very contemporary book, firmly grounded in the (western) young adult world of online communities and living, a world largely ignored by fiction but unmissable in real life. The former really baffles me but Hank, as he does so often, took care to lead the way. Thank you ♥️
-Also YES HANK, you do have a beautiful book cover. If you are a nerdfighter you will recognise a lot of Hank in the pages of the book.
-(I don't want to refer to how engaging the language or the plot was, I'm not a YA reader anyway and it's not the point I'm trying to make.)