I was intrigued right away by the premise of this book: troubled teen Jam Gallahue is sent to an East Coast therapeutic boarding school to help her overcome the death of her British exchange student boyfriend, Reeve Maxfield. There's something so upper-crust and mysterious about boarding schools that always hooks me; add in the British boyfriend (I love all things British) and I determined that this was a book I must read.
Once at school, Jam is placed into Special Topics in English, where she and her classmates are given journals that, they discover, have the power to transport them to a place they call Belzhar, where they can live in the past they long for. Overall, this was an interesting story line. I did have some problems, both with the magnitude of Jam's grief in relation to the short duration of her relationship, and with the book's final shocker revealed in the denouement. Definitely still a book worth reading though, both for its style and for its treatment of topics like first love, grief, and moving forward in the face of tragedy. Also, it's eminently quotable. I can't help loving lines like the following:
"People are always saying these things about how there's no need to read literature anymore - that it won't help the world. Everyone should apparently learn to speak Mandarin, and learn how to write code for computers. More young people should go into STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and math.
And that all sounds true and reasonable. But you can't say that what you learn in English class doesn't matter. That great writing doesn't make a difference [...] Words matter." p. 255-56
Once at school, Jam is placed into Special Topics in English, where she and her classmates are given journals that, they discover, have the power to transport them to a place they call Belzhar, where they can live in the past they long for. Overall, this was an interesting story line. I did have some problems, both with the magnitude of Jam's grief in relation to the short duration of her relationship, and with the book's final shocker revealed in the denouement. Definitely still a book worth reading though, both for its style and for its treatment of topics like first love, grief, and moving forward in the face of tragedy. Also, it's eminently quotable. I can't help loving lines like the following:
"People are always saying these things about how there's no need to read literature anymore - that it won't help the world. Everyone should apparently learn to speak Mandarin, and learn how to write code for computers. More young people should go into STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and math.
And that all sounds true and reasonable. But you can't say that what you learn in English class doesn't matter. That great writing doesn't make a difference [...] Words matter." p. 255-56