Book Reviews: 'Where They Found Her' by Kimberly McCreight and 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close' by Jonathan Safran Foer

1. Where They Found Her, by Kimberly McCreight:

This was a bit disappointing, honestly. I read one of McCreight's previous novels, Reconstructing Amelia, last summer and really loved it, but Where They Found Her fails to replicate the same compelling prose that McCreight created in Reconstructing Amelia. Where They Found Her follows journalist Molly Anderson as she is assigned to cover the developing case of an infant who was found dead in the small town of Ridgedale, New Jersey. The plot intertwines several different storylines of the people who live in the town, most notably PTA president Barbara and her family, Sandy, a high school dropout searching for her mother, as well as Molly's story following her recovery from a miscarriage she had a specific amount of time prior to the case. McCreight is extremely gifted at creating strong, character-driven narratives and that's part of what drew me into her writing in Reconstructing Amelia, but I think she loses herself in it this time around. She spends a bit too much time building characters whose storylines have nothing to do with the outcome of the story. That's not to say that is always a bad thing, but even though McCreight is skilled at building her characters, Where They Found Her's characters aren't all that interesting. She drops a lot of foreshadowing throughout that goes nowhere, and tries too hard to shock her readers to keep them interested. After awhile, I really stopped caring about who killed that baby or who it belonged to, which definitely isn't what you're supposed to feel while reading a seemingly complex, mystery/thriller novel. And, to top it off, the outcome/resolution to the mystery is super weak and unoriginal and it's totally obvious that McCreight was just trying to pick a character that no one would suspect while not making it realistic or believable that the character would do such a thing throughout the rest of the novel. Kind of weak and disappointing, but I'm not giving up hope that McCreight will create another strong, suspenseful novel like Reconstructing Amelia in the future. 3/5 stars.

2. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer:

Anyone whose read this will surely agree when I say it's a very unique book. It's a very unique story, told in a very unique prose. It's told in a very postmodern verse, if I'd be permitted to call it that. It corporates pages that may only have one sentence on them, or an unexplained image, or a page from a notebook with random annotations all over the text. This seems to bother a lot of readers but it doesn't really bother me, because it's specifically unique to this author and his book. But, as a result, the story itself can be really hard to follow. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is mostly about Oskar, a young boy whose father dies in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Oskar and his father were very close and very alike, and that becomes evident early on. I can say that the book is mostly about Oskar dealing with his father's death and the grief therein, but I can also say it's about his anxiety about the world. He's just a worrier, and that's the best way I can describe it. As someone who was a sensitive worrier at Oskar's age and it still a worrier now, it was calming to read. I had a few of those "we read to know we're not alone" moments. I don't want to say I didn't like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but it is kind of problematic at times. The story also follows Oskar's mysterious grandfather as well as Oskar's relationship with his grandmother, which is a bit too close at times. The chapters apparently narrated by Oskar's grandfather are very hard to follow and made little to no sense to me, at least in the context of the book. The story also seems to have no resolution, which was a bit anticlimactic, but at the same time, I think Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is supposed to be about reality more than anything else, so the fact that the story receives little resolution (at least concerning Oskar and his father) could be a metaphor for the unpredictability of life (wow, that makes me sound like I'm writing an essay. I'll stop.) SO... I didn't love it, I didn't hate it, but I can appreciate a lot of it and am willing to overlook a lot of the book's strange attributes or things that were left unresolved, because I think that's what the author was going for. I'm going to watch the movie soon too, because Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock. 3.5/5 stars. 

Book Review: 'Simon vs. The Homosapiens Agenda' by Becky Albertalli

I did not love this. Everyone across the Internet seems to love this book, but I have a few problems with it.

I avoided this book for quite awhile. Simon vs. The Homosapiens Agenda follows 16-year-old "not so openly gay" Simon Spier, who spends a lot of his time emailing anonymously with a boy he met online. Suddenly, his secret is at risk when one of his emails falls into the wrong hands, and he is being blackmailed. I avoided this book for a long time, mostly because the blackmail thing turned me off of it. Not because I thought it was a story that didn't need to be told, but because I just didn't want to experience that along with Simon. Not to mention the whole book struck me as something I like to call a painful coming-out story: a story where an LGBT person goes through ridiculous amounts of stress on the road to acceptance because people around him don't accept them or don't understand them. We've seen these types of stories over a wide spread of other books, movies and television series, and quite frankly, at this point in history, I'm more likely to read an LGBT story that deals with LGBT people being happy and not treated like aliens, even though society does unfortunately force it to that point. You might argue that that's unrealistic, but I'd prefer not to hear the same coming-out story where a gay teenager struggles to accept themselves while also trying to accept themselves amongst people who just aren't like them. I'm not delegitimizing other LGBT stories that have captured that experience powerfully and respectfully, but as far as my personal taste...no thank you.

I picked up Simon after hearing some good reviews, as well as seeing that a movie adaptation is in the works. But guess what? It's exactly the type of LGBT story I like to stay away from. I rolled my eyes so many times while reading this book that I'm surprised my eyes didn't roll right out of my head.

Simon starts off pretty cute. But you know what my main problems with this book are? a) Straight culture and b) Simon himself. Simon, as well as his friends, drove me crazy. They are just so melodramatic about everything. I'm not saying that coming out doesn't have a right to be melodramatic sometimes, because it definitely does, but Simon is just so annoying. He falls in love with someone over email, which I can understand, but then acts like some huge breakup has occurred when he stops answering his emails for a few chapters. Um? Okay? Maybe I just can no longer appreciate high school YA books anymore because this was just ridiculously overdramatic in a teenaged-high-schooler sense.

Getting back to addressing my main big problem with Simon: straight culture (this section may contain some minor spoilers, reader beware). When Simon comes out to his family, his sister almost immediately changes the subject to how she needs to tell her parents that she's dating someone because if Simon can come out to them, she can tell them about her boyfriend. Um, NOT THE SAME THING?! And then Simon makes a cute joke about his sister coming out as straight, and it's just supposed to be cute and alright. No. No, no, no, no. I won't condone that. Another example was when Simon's girl friends were getting jealous when they found out that he came out to one of them before the others. Yes, because that's the big issue here. Who means more as a friend to Simon. So. Many. Eye. Rolls. I acknowledge that Simon represents a lot of what gay boys go through when coming out in high school. High school is hell, and a lot of that hell is inescapable. But that doesn't mean that I'm just supposed to enjoy a lot of the bullshit conventions that straight culture has influenced into this story. All that comes to mind is: Can we just...not? I get that this is unfortunately representative of the heteronormative society we live in, but that doesn't make it right or that I have to like it.

I honestly didn't hate this book, but it was very far from perfect. Might I recommend a different gay YA book? The Great American Whatever by Tim Federle. I didn't think that book was exactly perfect either (I gave it 4 stars), but I still enjoyed it so much better than Simon vs. The Homosapiens Agenda. And, actually, a lot of what made me deduct a star from my rating of The Great American Whatever had nothing to do with the LGBT elements, but more just the development of the story itself. So as far as gay YA books go, I recommend that one over Simon. 3/5 stars.