Book Review: 'Everything, Everything' by Nicola Yoon

I'll tell you one thing: this started off promising. It really did. When I started Everything, Everything, I got the feeling that it would destroy me emotionally and leave me in a book hangover. But, as a lot of contemporary YA books do, it soon fell into cliché, overly cheesy and sometimes completely unrealistic territory.

Everything, Everything follows 18-year-old Madeline, who is sick with a rare illness in which she is essentially allergic to everything, and going outside is too big a risk. So, she stays inside her house all day every day, going to school online and the only interaction she has is with her mother and Carla, her nurse. Her love for reading is just as big as her desire to live a normal life. But then, oh then, a boy moves in next door, Olly, whose got family problems of his own. You see where this is going.

While the premise sounds like a thousand other YA books, I'll admit that the premise of Madeline's illness sounded interesting to me. It didn't quite sound like she was going to die (which she doesn't; that isn't really a spoiler), so I was intrigued to see where this book was going to go. But as it went on, it slowly lost its pzazz. A lot of chapters had barely any dialogue; just Madeline obsessing over anything. Having never been able to leave the house, I kind of understood her overthinking of things at first, but then I stopped giving her the time of day. She was just being "typical teenage girl" melodramatic after awhile. Not only that, the entire prose became melodramatic. Maybe I would have been into it if the story hadn't started to lose me, but even then, it did. But, at the same time, I just couldn't figure out where the story was going to go, so I still had motivation to continue reading.

Toppled with stereotypical teen melodrama, Everything, Everything just becomes unrealistic. At one point, Madeline just gets the urge to run outside and protect Olly during a family spat, surprising everyone. Okay, no. You expect us to believe a girl who has supposedly never left the house just gets the urge to run outside? Does she even know how to do that? All for her precious Olly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nothing special to see here. Madeline then somehow applies for a credit card and seems to get one, no questions asked, and book a trip to Hawaii. At this point, I was just laughing and rolling my eyes while reading. I know there are some readers who would buy this in a YA book, but I'm not one of them.

Olly's story wasn't anything particularly special, either. His father is abusive and became so after losing his job, yadda yadda yadda. It seems the author put zero effort in making that story unique in any way; bland as bland could be. Father becomes abusive because he lost his job has been seen many other times. At this point, Everything, Everything started to remind me of All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven, except in that book, more is left up to the imagination about the male character's home life, which I thought was much more effective.

So, the ending? Well, I will not spoil it, but it is ridiculous. I have never seen an ending like it before in YA, but that does not mean it is a good thing. I think the author thought she was being unique and trying to surprise teenage readers who, again, would buy it in a story, but I like to think I'm a little too advanced of a reader to buy it. Would I recommend Everything, Everything? Depends; if you like any cheesy YA book ever, I think you'll like it. If you're like me and like to read YA looking for new approaches/additions to the genre, nope. Skip it. 3/5 stars.

Thoughts I Had While Watching 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' For the First Time

I color myself somewhat of a self-proclaimed Disney enthusiast, but there are a few movies that I've never seen. Being a 90s child, it could've just been that I didn't own the ones I've never seen, or I never had any interest in them. In any event, I realized a few months ago that I'd never seen The Hunchback of Notre Dame; not only that, it was the only movie from the Renaissance Disney period that I'd never seen. So, I borrowed it from my aunt (Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection VHS copy, of course), and today, I was in the mood for a Disney flick, so I watched it. And I do have some thoughts that need expressing.

First of all, I was not aware or prepared for how dark The Hunchback of Notre Dame is, and after a Google search, I saw that it considered one of the darkest Disney animated features, so at least I'm not alone on that one. Up until the part where spectators in Notre Dame have tied ropes around Quasimodo and start throwing food at him while laughing where I wanted to shout, "This is BRUTAL!", I think I only thought it was quite different and out-of-touch with other stories Disney has adapted, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing. I was a bit taken aback by how it was just so apparent to everyone that the baby in the beginning (Quasimodo, the "Hunchback"), was hideous. I grew up in a world where Disney played with the emotions of children with themes that they could understand to a certain extent. So, to see a Disney cartoon where a child is deemed hideous and hidden away to ring bells in Notre Dame simply because he is deformed and perceived as unattractive, was quite a shock to me. I know; things like this have obviously happened in real life; much worse things have happened. I know how people throughout history have treated minority groups, no matter what they are. I've read The Diary of Anne Frank. I was just not prepared to see such a story handled in a Disney cartoon that came out 20 years ago.

I'm a little ambiguous to decide whether or not the fact that Disney chose to adapt such a story into an animated feature is a good thing. On the one hand, one could argue that The Hunchback of Notre Dame teaches people that beauty is not skin-deep and they can rise above people who mistreat them. In that regard, this movie reminds me of one of my all-time favorite Disney movies, Beauty and the Beast (I told you already, I'm a 90s child). The key difference between these two movies, however, is that Beauty and the Beast is adapted from a fairy tale in which a cocky prince has a spell placed on him so he can learn the value of treating people, no matter their appearance, with respect. He's also a whimsical animal-like character who is shown to have a soft side and it's all good after awhile and he transforms back into his beautiful, rugged self at the end. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is more real; it's a man who is physically deformed and, in the 1800s, people obviously didn't take nicely to that. People today still don't necessarily take nice to that. Not only that, but the female lead of the movie, Esmeralda, a gypsy, is persecuted because Judge Frollo is bigoted towards gypsies and wants to rid Notre Dame of these "creatures". This is when the movie lost me in terms of as a Disney that is somewhat geared towards children. If I had watched this as a child, I would not have known what a gypsy was, let alone why Frollo was so insistent on having her killed. Most children of a certain age, thankfully, don't understand the concept of discrimination, so this would be absolutely foreign to them. Then Esmeralda breaks out into a song titled "God Help the Outcasts", which is catchy of course, as it was composed by the genius minds that composed all the songs of Renaissance Disney, but I was just sitting there thinking, "This is so different from every Disney movie I've ever seen, ever. I would not have liked this as a kid, most probably because I would have for sure not have understood it."

I did some research after watching it (I couldn't just sit back and believe that this movie was commercially successful as all movies of its kind and time and that it received "largely positive reviews" as Google was telling me). I found out that some critics brought up the fact that some of its themes, including infanticide, damnation, sin and genocide, were not in fact appropriate for an audience geared, in part, towards children. There was also a study done on children in audiences shortly after the movie's release, which found that kids were "unaffected" by The Hunchback of Notre Dame's mature themes and enjoyed it. You wanna know why they were "unaffected" by these mature themes? Because they would not have even understood them! What 6-year-old has a grasp on why the mean old white guy wants to kill the black gypsy just for being herself? I barely have a grasp on it as an adult, because it's ridiculous. Even a legendary Disney feminist film like Mulan is easier for kids to grasp in that it's obvious to anyone, even kids, that women do not have a huge part in the army, let alone in China. I watched Mulan as a kid and fully understood by the context that women were not allowed to join the army. That was that. Would I have understood why everyone was being so mean to Quasimodo just because he was "ugly"? I can guarantee you I would not, because I don't really understand it now; why would you adapt a story with a theme like that and introduce it to kids? Yes, that's the world we live in; pretty people are favored above all and maybe you can praise the movie for introducing that to a younger audience, but I do not think kids should have to concern themselves with that. They will grow up and learn it way too soon enough that the world is a harsh place to live, let them enjoy a Disney movie where they don't have to see people tying up an ugly person and throwing food at him, all with laughter and smiles. Yes, Quasimodo gets revenge and Frollo dies in the end, but is he really all that liberated? I actually thought that The Hunchback of Notre Dame might not follow the typical heteronormative romance plot, but then Esmeralda gets with Phoebus, the brooding, handsome hero of the movie when they basically didn't even know each other all that well. But hey, that was the only option for her, right? She couldn't exactly get with Quasimodo, who clearly loved her, because he's ugly! Her man has to be pretty and strong and handsome, with broad shoulders.

And so concludes my rant about watching The Hunchback of Notre Dame, most definitely the darkest Disney film in history, for the first time. I honestly do not recommend watching this with your kids. And you know something? Maybe there's another reason I never saw this movie growing up: because someone told someone that I shouldn't watch it. Thank you to whoever that was. I'm glad my childhood didn't have The Hunchback of Notre Dame in it.

Book Review: 'I Know What I'm Doing—And Other Lies I Tell Myself' by Jen Kirkman // Other Recent Reads

Jen Kirkman's I Know What I'm Doing—And Other Lies I Tell Myself might go down as one of my favorite memoirs I've ever read. It's just so...relevant. At least it was to me, and I think if you really sit and think about the topics she subtly tackles through her own real life stories, you'll come to agree with me. Let me just get this out of the way and say: I highly, highly recommend it, even if you have absolutely no idea who Jen Kirkman is. That will not matter.

I didn't know a whole lot about Jen Kirkman before reading her book. I knew she's a comedian, her tweets are funny, and she's wrote another book before this one about how she can barely take care of herself, how could she have a child? (I'm just inferring from the title. It's literally called I Can Barely Take Care of Myself: Tales From a Happy Life Without Kids.) Anyway. That's enough for me to at least want to read her book, because she seems funny and the premise of her memoir really caught my eye. It sounded like the kind of book that I could pick up when I was feeling down about myself for whatever reason and lose myself in her stories about anything and everything, and somehow it will make me feel better (the last memoir to do this to me was Drew Barrymore's Wildflower.) So, I marked it as "want to read" on Goodreads, thinking that it might not be a book I'd ever get to, but certainly wanted to. Then, one hot day in July, I found myself at the bookstore with a prioritized list of books that I was going to buy. I only ended up finding one of those books in stock, and while looking for that book, I came across I Know What I'm Doing—And Other Lies I Tell Myself and said to myself, "OMG! I have to buy this because it's here now and I'm here now and it sounds amazing."

A couple months passed before I picked it up for real and started reading it, and I'm so glad I did. Kirkman tackles, through her own stories, the ridiculousness that society forces upon us sometimes. She got married and it didn't work out, like countless marriages, so she got divorced. Her eye-opening accounts of how, in this decade, divorced women are treated by other women who are even close to them, is important. At one point, she even had to switch doctors because her former doctor was treating her like a hippie and judging her, all because she'd had 2 partners since getting divorced! It was just one of those books that talks about things that are there; they've always been there, but only when reading a book about them do you truly realize how much they're there. Society forces some stupid shit on us for no apparent reason other than it's what other people have deemed respectable, especially for women, and it's great to read about someone who basically gives the finger to that stuff. Among my favorites in Kirkman's book were the first time she traveled alone since divorcing, and how people were "worried" for her to be traveling alone without a man (yet this convention doesn't seem to exist for the opposite sex), and her hilarious account of staying in on New Year's Eve in 2013 because she was sick of being forced to go out and have fun just because it's New Year's Eve. But, above all, my favorite part of the book was chapter 10, titled, "I'm Okay, You're Okay", in which Kirkman lists out things that it's okay to do despite the fact that other people make you think it's wrong. For example, "It's okay to not want monogamy for some periods of your life", or "It's okay to drop your old friends from grade school", or "It's okay to talk honestly about sex". The chapter also contains my favorite quote from the entire book, which is:

"You want the life someone else has? That's because you can only see their outside and you're comparing it with your inside."

To repeat, I highly recommend I Know What I'm Doing—And Other Lies I Tell Myself to anyone living on Planet Earth. It's for sure one of the best memoirs I've ever read and also one of if not the best feminist book I've ever read. 5/5 stars.

I've also read some other books that I am choosing not to review in full, because I really didn't like them all that much. I read My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises by Fredrik Backman, which I totally expected to love, but I totally really did not. It tells the story of 7-year-old Elsa grappling with a world that no longer contains her Granny, and it really sounded like one of those diamond in the rough books that is underrated, but it's not, at least for me. It was a little too out there for my tastes, and the ending was entirely lame and underwhelming. 2 out of 5 stars from me. I also picked up Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, a celebrated classic, which I also did not enjoy. There are definitely some classic books that transcend the amount of time since they were published, but Frankenstein is not one of them. It was written in 1816 and you can definitely tell that it was, and the story itself doesn't seem all that special all these years later. I appreciate Frankenstein for its contribution to popular culture, but I am not a fan of the novel itself. Nopety nope nope. Another 2 out of 5 stars.

Book Reviews: 'My Salinger Year' by Joanna Rakoff and 'Dear Emma' by Katie Heaney

1. My Salinger Year, by Joanna Rakoff:
This was a simple, fun and, for the most part, entertaining read. Rakoff tells the story of the year she worked at a literary agency in New York City as an editor's assistant who was later put in charge of answering the one and only J.D. Salinger's fan mail. Salinger, who didn't want to receive any fan mail or any mail whatsoever, asked the agency to send out a form letter saying that they were not permitted to send on the person's letter to him. Rakoff, however, finds herself emotionally invested in some of the letters and begins sending back her own personalized replies explaining how Salinger doesn't want any mail but at the same time tries to offer them advice. At times, My Salinger Year read not like a memoir, but like a dated contemporary novel, which was nice sometimes and not so nice at others. While it was interesting to read about the goings-on of a lit agency in NYC in the late 90s when the world was on the cusp of going completely digital, Rakoff's story seems...somewhat useless at times. I'm not discrediting what working for the agency and Salinger did for her and her career, but there were parts in the book where I just felt like the dust jacket description was over-selling it. It's just Rakoff telling her story of becoming an adult, facing the harsh real world and the year she worked for the lit agency that represented J.D. Salinger. Yes, there were parts where she talks about responding to the fan mail, but I wouldn't describe that as the central part of her story like the dust jacket seems to. There were times where I wanted to scream at her, asking her why she was doing that or why she was insistent on dating and living with a complete and total ass who she didn't even like most of the time, but alas, Joanna did not listen to me. My Salinger Year is definitely a story worth telling and is very interesting and relatable in parts, but in others I found it a tad underwhelming. Maybe that's just me, but I felt like Rakoff could have tried a little harder to justify some of her life choices and career goals in something she's called a memoir. 4/5 stars. 

2. Dear Emma, by Katie Heaney:
How shall I describe Dear Emma? It was...okay. Heaney is one of my favorite BuzzFeed writers; I've loved every non-fiction piece I've come across of hers on there, so when I heard that she was coming out with her fiction debut about a college girl who runs an advice column for her school's paper, I thought it sounds just like the book for me. And it was. It just...could have been better. Harriet is the woman behind Dear Emma, an advice column for a Midwestern college newspaper. When Harriet starts going out with Keith, who she really likes, she thinks she's finally found someone, but then he completely blows her off and starts going out with Remy, who works at the campus library with Harriet. It was cute and original in parts where it sheds light on Facebook stalking and dating in the iPhone and social media age, but I think Dear Emma could have been a cute, easy and better book if the writing style wasn't so juvenile and more than half the story wasn't just Harriet interacting with her two best friends and roommates, Mel and Logan. There were times like I felt I was standing in a women's locker room listening to some white-bred, straight twentysomething girls over-analyze a text message. I'm all for cute contemporaries where girls overthink things like social interactions and text messages, but the writing style was just way too juvenile for me at times. Please God, never use more than one exclamation point or question mark in a piece of writing that you're going to show to people and have it count for something. I don't care what it is, just never do it. Like, honestly, Dear Emma isn't even about the Dear Emma column very much. It's just Harriet, her sometimes annoying friends, the guy who blows her off, the unfortunate soul who falls for him next and a bunch of jumbled conversations. It definitely had parts that I enjoyed, and parts where it felt like I was having teeth pulled just to finish the chapter. A lot of the interactions between the characters really had absolutely nothing to do with the point of the story or its outcome. And the point of the story promised on the back cover? It only actually starts happening more than halfway through the book. It's not all bad, but definitely not great. I should probably rate it lower, but I'm trying to focus on the book's positive attributes. 3.5/5 stars.