Tag: carti adolescenti

Posted in Zoulfa Katouh

As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow by Zoulfa Katouh

Posted on by roxtao

SYNOPSIS:

Salama Kassab was a pharmacy student when the cries for freedom broke out in Syria. She still had her parents and her big brother; she still had her home. She had a normal teenager’s life.

Now Salama volunteers at a hospital in Homs, helping the wounded who flood through the doors daily. Secretly, though, she is desperate to find a way out of her beloved country before her sister-in-law, Layla, gives birth. So desperate, that she has manifested a physical embodiment of her fear in the form of her imagined companion, Khawf, who haunts her every move in an effort to keep her safe.

But even with Khawf pressing her to leave, Salama is torn between her loyalty to her country and her conviction to survive. Salama must contend with bullets and bombs, military assaults, and her shifting sense of morality before she might finally breathe free. And when she crosses paths with the boy she was supposed to meet one fateful day, she starts to doubt her resolve in leaving home at all.

Soon, Salama must learn to see the events around her for what they truly are—not a war, but a revolution—and decide how she, too, will cry for Syria’s freedom.

REVIEW:

Since I was a kid, my reading pattern is loving a genre for a few years, until my brain is oversaturated with it and then moving on to another genre that I’ll be addicted to, for the next few years. Rinse and repeat, throughout my whole life.

I long forgotten about YA books for the last decade or so. And I kind of though that at this age now, I would probably get dizzy from rolling my eyes at the usual teen drama.

However, As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow gave me a very clear reminder why I loved YA for so many years. Besides the main storyline, which I’ll discuss later, I couldn’t help myself from smiling because of the young love story within it. I was surprised to see that I’m reading those parts with the same delight as 15 years ago.

But As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow is definitely way, way more than just a love story. It’s a microscope that looks straight into the cruelty of war and terror and cuts through your heart with every page.

“The rest of the world does’t know (…) Syria is just a word to them. But to us, she’s our life.“
Syria. Ukraine. Palestine. How many of these names are indeed, just words, for us who are living in safe places. We hear something about a war somewhere, we pity the people of that country and maybe shudder at the thought for a while. But it’s so unbelievably difficult to really understand the enormity of a war. It’s absolutely impossible to imagine that yesterday, those people were living just like us, going to the office, meeting friends in a coffee shop, decorating their new apartment, watering their plants. And today their whole world is in crumbles, their families torn and they can either stay there and wait for an inevitable violent death or pack all what’s left from the rubble in one suitcase and try to run towards a world that does not want them.

There used to be a quote by Warsan Shire circulating online a while back and I feel it tattooed on my heart since the first time I read it. I think it defines more than ever the current state of our world:

“later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered

everywhere

everywhere

everywhere.“

Every single time when I reach to any historical fiction I am reminded of the horrors that humans inflicted for centuries over their own kind. And every time I am shocked that we continue to do so, without a single glance in the past, without a trace of mercy. Just cruelty, distruction and unbelievable greed everywhere… And the price? “Your life sliced away from you piece by piece“

I read the first half of the book with a mix of sadness, anger and hope. The second half I read it… with my heart in my throat. By the time I finished it, I felt physically exhausted, as if my whole being lived inside the pages. It’s unbelievably how swiftly and subtly the author draws you into the story until your emotions are not yours anymore and they fully entwine with the ones of her characters.

I don’t even have space in my brain now to comment or analyse the characters, the style, all the things that I normally talk about in my reviews. Zoulfa Katouh mirrored all the faces of humanity in her characters, the good and the bad, the kindness and the evil, the fear and the courage. And more impressing is the fact that oftentimes, all those opposite emotions radiate not from different characters but live inside each one of them.

I’m honestly feeling grateful for having had the privilege to read this book, grateful to the author for bringing light about this topic in such a a way. Despite the heaviness, despite all the terror and sorrow that reverberate throughout the pages, you are left with hope at the end of the book. And as she wrote in her Acknowledgments, that was the main purpose of the novel.

Posted in Taylor Jenkins Reid

The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Posted on by roxtao

SYNOPSIS:

Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now? Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband has left her, and her professional life is going nowhere. Regardless of why Evelyn has selected her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jumpstart her career. Summoned to Evelyn’s luxurious apartment, Monique listens in fascination as the actress tells her story. From making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s to her decision to leave show business in the ’80s, and, of course, the seven husbands along the way, Evelyn unspools a tale of ruthless ambition, unexpected friendship, and a great forbidden love. Monique begins to feel a very real connection to the legendary star, but as Evelyn’s story nears its conclusion, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique’s own in tragic and irreversible ways.

REVIEW:

I am so unimpressed by this book that I don’t even know what to write in this review. I didn’t hate it, but everything in it was so bland that I find it inexplicable how it managed to create such waves in the reading communities.

The whole book revolves around the idea of the difficulties of being queer during an era when this was seen as one of the greatest possible sins. Unfortunately, for me, it just didn’t look like it was enough to center a whole novel around it. Some might say that the fame of the protagonist is adding more to the tension of the story, but objectively, the stardom (and the money and influence that come with it) only made things easier for the protagonists.

I’m always open to love a book even if the storyline is not the best, if it compensates with some good characters. But besides Harry, the longest lasting husband of Evelyn, who was really lovely (still pretty dull, but at least sweet enough to balance it), everyone else was either insipid or terribly annoying.

There’s no drama, no suspense, nothing memorable or breathtaking. Just a flat, boring and flavourless story that wants to be deep but fails. I did like the fact that there is no joyous ending. The only thing that would have made things worse would have been to turn the whole plot into a classic happy ending where everything gets bubbly and optimistic.

Posted in Ruta Sepetys

I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys

Posted on by roxtao

SYNOPSIS:

Romania, 1989. Communist regimes are crumbling across Europe. Seventeen-year-old Cristian Florescu dreams of becoming a writer, but Romanians aren’t free to dream; they are bound by rules and force.

Amidst the tyrannical dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu in a country governed by isolation and fear, Cristian is blackmailed by the secret police to become an informer. He’s left with only two choices: betray everyone and everything he loves—or use his position to creatively undermine the most notoriously evil dictator in Eastern Europe.

Cristian risks everything to unmask the truth behind the regime, give voice to fellow Romanians, and expose to the world what is happening in his country. He eagerly joins the revolution to fight for change when the time arrives. But what is the cost of freedom?

A gut-wrenching, startling window into communist Romania and the citizen spy network that devastated a nation, from the number one New York Times best-selling, award-winning author of Salt to the Sea and Between Shades of Gray.

REVIEW:

My blood was trembling in my veins during this entire read. I’m familiar with Ruta Sepetys’ work, so when I found out that her next book is about the Romanian communism and revolution I didn’t know how to get it faster. I have no idea if her new novel will impress readers from other countries as much, but as a Romanian born during the communism, I have to take my hat off to the impressive work the writer has done. I’m in an awe that such a well documented book can be written by someone who not only is not Romanian, but had absolutely no previous connection to Romania until just a few years back. I can’t imagine how many years Ruta worked in order to aquire such amount of information, but the fact that there is a list of five (5!!) pages of sources at the end of the novel, gives you an idea about the amount of documentation needed in order to create such a realistic story.

It’s not just the romanian words that are thrown everywhere in the book. If the writer wouldn’t have used any, the impact would have been exactly the same. But every single description of the places, the atmosphere, the interactions or the feelings is literally screaming “Romania”. The book might not impress by the amount of shocking events. Or at least not until the last few chapters. But it builds such a dense tension that you can feel it covering your soul, your thoughts, just by recreating the normality of those years. The scepticism, the doubt, the constant feeling that you’re being watched and heard, the habit of always looking over your shoulder. The hunger, the darkness and the cold. The whispers, the suffocation. And over everything, the fear. The constant fear, the paralyzing fear that never goes away since you are a child and until you die. In you and in every single person around you. The fear becomes as normal and everlasting as your breathing, crushing your mind, your will, your dreams, your voice, bending you as a human being, bending an entire society.

Any revolution is a fight for freadom, a scream against suffering and distress. But what we often forget and what this book emphasizes is that a revolution is not only agains the system. It’s also against your deepest fears, agains your survival instinct that tells you to stay hidden, to stay safe, against your mother telling you not to go out, because outside it’s dangerous, against you leaving your friends in danger in order to go out there and confront an even greater danger. Because it’s not just about you, it’s about everything and everyone around you and all the generations following.

Between the pages of I Must Betray You are decades of pain that an entire country had suffered. Things that, depending on our age, we either lived or heard so much from our parents or grandparents that seem almost normal or unimpressive. For us, this is just how things were, that’s it. But for readers born in countries that were always free, for people unfamiliar with what communism meant, all our normality will look appalling. Ruta Sepetys doesn’t offer a history lesson. She literally takes you from your comfortable present and throws you in the past, in the middle of the history, living and feeling along with the characters inside the book.

Posted in Rachel Sanderson

Mirror Me by Rachel Sanderson

Posted on by roxtao

Synopsis:

Abbie Fray has moved with her family from Sydney to Derrington, a country town where everybody knows everybody and the mobile reception sucks. She’s left behind her best friend, her school, and her favourite bakery. She thinks her life can’t get any worse.

Then she makes a terrifying discovery.

Abbie looks just like Rebecca O’Reilley, a girl who was brutally murdered in Derrington a year earlier. And it doesn’t take long before Abbie learns there’s more connecting them than just appearance.

Not even a budding romance with the kind, quirky and gorgeous Zeke is enough to stop Abbie’s curiosity about the murder developing into a dangerous obsession.

Who is sending Abbie anonymous threats?

And why does she keep dreaming about the scene of Becky’s death?

As questions mount, Abbie only knows one thing for sure: she must find out what really happened the night Rebecca O’Reilley was killed.

But what if the truth is closer – and deadlier – than she could possibly imagine?

Review:

The book’s description makes it pretty difficult to understand from the beginning the type of story you’re dealing with. Is it a thriller? A fantasy? A paranormal mystery? What I definitely knew is that Mirror Me will float somewhere in the large category of Young Adult books and since I had a few years long obsession with this genre, I was curious to go back to it after so long and see if it’s still my cup of tea.

I guess Mirror Me was a lucky choice, because I honestly didn’t roll my eyes as many times as I was imagining I would be. Yes, it has a few details that seem a bit too much, but if I’m being honest, I think those have to do more with the typical teenage mentality in general rather than with the author’s writing.

Despite starting from a clearly improbable plot, the storyline develops into a very realistic way compared to the general tendency of YA novels. No absent parents, no wild adventures, no sudden crazy love hits (a mild crush is definitely acceptable and expected), no huge dramas. The storyline is calm and down-to-earth, with all the ups and downs that you’re expecting when it comes to a life changing move across the country during the most challenging years of a teen. A teen who now has to deal with an additional issue that turns her even more into an outsider.

I did like the pragmatic relationships between the characters, both when it comes to family and friends, I liked the no-nonsense portrait of the heroine and how balanced her behavior remains, although she’s confronted with more and more challenges and she often feels that she’s losing her mind.

The twist in the last chapters doesn’t come as much of a surprise. The author inserts enough clues during the pages to give you a strong suspicion about who might be the culprit. But the background story that represents the real motive is astonishing and impossible to guess beforehand.

Entertaining without becoming addictive, Mirror Me will be a light read that you will probably enjoy. It doesn’t have any imperfections that would make it an unpleasant story, but in the same time, it also doesn’t come with anything spectacular to make you fall in love with it.

Posted in J.K. Rowling

The Ickabog by J.K. Rowling

Posted on by roxtao

Synopsis:

The Ickabog is a fairy tale, set in an imaginary land, which J.K. Rowling says is ‘about truth and the abuse of power’. It was written as a read-aloud story, but it’s suitable for seven to nine-year-olds to read to themselves. The story will be translated into a number of other languages and made available on the website shortly after the English language version appears.

Review:

The Ickabog is a fairytale described as suitable for kids 7 to 9 years old, but if we already learned something from J.K. Rowling’s famous children’s books is that once you’ve started the first pages, you will be compelled, no matter how old you are.

The storyline starts in Cornucopia, one of the greatest and luckiest kingdoms that ever existed, ruled by a well intentioned, but naive and absent king. Following the story of two normal children, their parents and some not so innocent royal advisers, we witness the decay of a once magnificent kingdom and the ever growing mold that roots from corruption, incompetence and fear of speaking out. It’s somehow a story that would still be a valid metaphor if used in any situation, whether we’re thinking about countries, companies, schools or any society in general. Because wherever there’s a group of people, there will always be a fight between right and wrong, between morality and corruption, between the common good and individualism.

Although much more simplistic and obviously, much shorter than any Harry Potter novel (don’t get too excited and give yourself unrealistic hopes, no, it’s nothing similar!), one thing that I found the two stories have in common is how easily they make you care for their characters. In The Ickabog, in a much smaller number of pages, Rowling still plays with your feelings like a puppeteer manoeuvres his marionettes. You will experience every single emotion, from joy, to hope, to fear and frustration and you will despise some characters with an intensity that it will surprise you. Perhaps there is no magic in Cornucopia, but there is definitely something magical about this ability.

The only issue I had with the book is the age of targeted readers. The book’s official description mentions “7 to 9 years old” and honestly, I have no idea what kids these days are reading at that age. So I might be wrong when I’m saying this. But I just felt there’s so much pain and betrayal, so much unfairness and bitterness radiating from the pages of the book that somehow, the joyful moments or even the happy ending (no spoiler here, it’s a fairytale, what would you expect?) might not manage to erase the shadows left by the ugly parts. The main characters may get a somewhat cheery finale, but the sorrow and losses they suffered during the years are still shading their lives. Yes, there’s nothing more real than this lesson, but is indeed “7 to 9” the right age to dwell into this truth?