Johanna Florez
1.5 rounded up because it (mostly) didn't make me regret learning how to read. I think it had a decent outline, besides failing to consider social media until 97% through the story (in my digital version which was obviously missing chunks early on).
I never bought in to the believability of the central relationship. I have no idea why they're together. All I got was mild grooming vibes every time the age gap came up, and remembering how the boyfriend fixed the devastatingly shy girlfriend's extreme touch aversion in a couple days. The kissing scenes were genuinely yucky. Not romantic at all. Incredibly incredibly awkward.
Overall this book did a lot of telling rather than showing and came across in places as the math professor's diary. I found numerous elements of it annoying, but the ending managed to avoid frustrating me, so it wins a little credit there.
Nothing happened (besides her languishing in a hospital for a couple months not badly sick but not well enough to go home) and she didn't say anything (except that she likes New York, but with no sense of place to show me why). It's like Villette in that the narrator is definitely tiptoeing around something she doesn't want to talk about, except way more obvious and way less interesting. I've got a complicated relationship with my mom and even there, this book didn't do a darn thing for me. Maybe if I already liked the writer or was already invested in this character I would have appreciated almost 200 pages of random musings, but as it was it just bored me.
A great story in which I learned a lot I didn't know before. But there were some minor, easily correctable errors that distracted me (a list of 52 families on one page grew to 54 families about 3 pages later with no explanation for the discrepancy). I found some of the narration repetitive, perhaps due to the book's structure. Teddy tells Karyn the conversation he had with someone, and then he tells her about when he talked to someone else and recounted the first conversation. I wished the Teddy chapters and the short Karyn chapters were completely separate so I wouldn't have to contend with so many layers of nested quotation marks. Still, the characters managed to get my heartstrings.
This was cute and I think would be a super fun way to practice following instructions, fine motor skills, and spatial awareness for preschoolers and kindergarteners who can manipulate the book as described on each page. Only 4 stars because I couldn't stop thinking about how I wished I was reading The Monster At The End of This Book with Grover from Sesame Street.
Lots of big words for little ears, but the 1.75 year old listened quietly to the whole thing (even though it was my first time reading it, so I wasn't reading perfectly fluidly). Something was working for the little one. And their parents liked the illustrations, even though those kind of freaked me out.
I'm so conflicted about this book. It's poorly written, with excessive telling instead of showing. That problem was almost unbearable at the start of the book, improving as the protagonists met each other and the plot picked up, but it remained annoying through the end of the book. People don't talk to each other like they do in this book. They certainly didn't sit around explaining the definitions of terms like Holocaust and Prisoner of War, while the events were ongoing. It felt like the author thought I was very stupid or uneducated.
I also realized that, while the three protagonists do eventually gain somewhat distinct personalities, fundamentally they were all privileged, educated women. (Yes, even the Jewish refugee, in her own way - going to the servants to learn how to do housework.) While there is some value to acknowledging that World War Two affected upper social classes, it's surprising to me that a story set in the East End, centering on a free public service, didn't explore what that meant to people who weren't already well read and articulate. Don't get me wrong, the poetry snippets were lovely enough that I resisted looking up their publication dates. But when all the protagonists have a sense of pride in their own intelligence and accomplishments, I wonder about all those who were already scraping by before the war.
Despite my complaints, I still managed to be moved almost to tears by each of the protagonists' happy endings. There was just enough emotional buy-in that I was happy to see them happy. (Come to think of it, I probably only liked the protagonists because they were three educated women like myself. I do tend to like talking with smart women, unless they're acting superior, which I saw later in the story.) Perhaps this was meant to be a feel-good story all along. That seems a little absurd given that it's set during the Blitz. Out of three protagonists, all of them got their happily ever after and none of them faced an unbearable loss? We had some side characters lose loved ones, but their grief was as distant as the poverty and lack of education in the community.
To sum up, I enjoyed parts of this when I was not distracted by the many errors, awkward wordings, or troubling perspectives suggested by the book. (I can't even get into the internment camp being presented like a fun summer vacation without doing more research first, but it made me very uncomfortable. YAY PRISON.) I don't regret having read this, especially since it's based on a true story, but I wouldn't recommend it... Except maybe to an adult reader who lacks an elementary knowledge of World War Two.
I appreciate that this book leaves the “terrible thing” unnamed, keeping the story universal for any children who have experienced trauma, while still including that the child finally discussed the terrible thing with a trusted counselor. I feel that this would be valuable to reread throughout a child or family's ongoing experience with trauma to remember that it's normal for the manifestations of trauma to change over time. I also think it could put children and families at ease about what happens in counseling for traumatized children... Talking and playing and drawing until the child feels better and can cope better. I hope this book makes many people feel very seen when they can't act like themselves due to things they don't want to discuss.
I'm still wrapping my head around the bulk of the story so I'll just say I have mixed feelings about the framing device. At times it was compelling to read the outsider's perspective of the primary narrator, and the reason for that narrator being in that place was an interesting twist. Other times I just went “wait, how long has he just been talking?”
No also I'll say I have mixed feelings about the multicultural settings. Early on I was worried it would turn into “oh no a spooky black lady put a magic curse on a poor innocent white guy” and I was glad it DIDN'T turn into that. But for how much the primary narrator travels the world, wow the whiter countries got a lot of attention. Again there's some justifications for it at certain points in the story (characters trying to leverage the privilege educated white people brought to international spaces), but with as many times as he says he goes to India, I really could have read more pages about India than about the walk he took by himself in Australia. If he connects with two different women maybe the Indian could get a quarter of the attention that the Irish girl (who's avoiding him) gets. The author makes it very clear that the phenomenon described in the book occurs in any and every culture, yet it only really matters if it impacts people from the British Isles, and maybe a couple central and western Europeans. We meet one Asian man (in America) for like one chapter and then he disappears. The narrator literally could have gone back to Africa any time and it might have been helpful, but he just didn't.
But overall I really enjoyed reading this. It was terrible bedtime reading as I got curious about all the twisting intrigues and caught up in the urgency of the approaching curse.
In the background of many scenes a small child is peeking out from hiding places. Who is he? What did he do?
This book is nice as a bedtime story because nothing much happens until you wind up back where you belong. It would also be a nice break if a kid doesn't feel like eating a meal they really need to eat. And I think it would be fun to look at with a preliterate older toddler who likes describing miniscule details they find in illustrations.