How to Say Goodbye in Robot

I would like to write a review of How to Say Goodbye in Robot, but mostly I want to talk about the packaging, and the gender segregation of reading.

How to Say Goodbye in Robot, by Natalie Standiford is about a girl named Bea who moves to new town and meets Jonah, an outcast boy, by chance and then becomes sort of friends with him. It's very much a young adult book. Its all about friendship in the face of social structures. What saves it is the quirky narrator and the fact that all the teen characters are likable.

My problem with this book is that it's very pink. Here's a picture for refference:

But that's not the limit of the pink; the end plates, the page numbers, anything bold, the division between parts, its all pink. There's literally no page that's free of pink. There's nothing wrong with pink. Its a fine color, but I don't think there's any other color with as strong a connotation. By up-ending the pink paint can over HtSGiR, the publishers marked it clearly as a book for girls. Can you imagine the looks a teen boy would get reading that book on the bus to high school?

There are some books that I can understand giving the pink treatment, Gossip Girl maybe, or even the Anne of Green Gables series, but HtSGiR is not a book that boys wouldn't enjoy. The only reason I can think of to pink-ify it is because the narrator is a girl. Apparently, the publishers think boys don't read about girls and need an advanced warning system. Boys certainly won't read about girls if every book with more than one female character is packaged as for girls only.

The book gets 5/8.

The cover gets 0/8.

An Abundance of Katherines

I had high expectations for An Abundance of Katherines, by John Green. It's about Colin, a washed up child protege who has been dumped by 19 girls named Katherine, and his post-high school road trip with his best friend Hassan. On first glance, Katherines is a perfect storm of awesome, -- it has a clever protagonist who loves trivia, anagrams, and math -- but somehow it isn't.

That's not to say that I didn't enjoy An Abundance of Katherines, I did. It was funny, and touching and the theme was nice. I think my problem was that it felt like a romance story. It was as if the point of the book was not Colin learning his lesson about mattering, but Colin kissing the girl, with learning as a result. Which is fine, but it is not what I was hopng for.

I'm going to leave this review short like this, because I don't have much more to say about Katherines, a great set up, but a bit of a let down.

5/8

Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Will Grayson, Will Grayson (Heretofore referred to as WGWG because that is a long title,) by John Green and David Levithan, is about two boys named Will Grayson and each author writes from the perspective of one Will and they alternate chapters. Eventually Will meets Will and lives are changed. At least, that's what the officially summary says. And that is what the book is about on the surface, but in a more meaningful way, its about Tiny Cooper, the very large and very gay best friend of Green's Grayson, but that's really tangential to this review.

The strength of WGWG is by far the characters. Every character is the book is well rounded and sympathetic and flawed and lovable. The Wills are different enough to be interesting without being so different that it seems contrived. Even the villainous Mara has redeeming qualities. I was especially pleased by the way that the parents of the Will's were portrayed. It would have been easy for any of the parents to come across as somewhere between callus and monstrous, but instead they read as full and realistic, just like all the other characters.

WGWG is not free from flaws. It has some of the genre cliches of teen fiction. Both the Wills are very much typical young adult characters. They're outcasts, they're both to some extent loners, and they both have limited emotional responses -- Green's Will doesn't care, and Levithan's gets mad. It could be argued that teen characters are written that way because teens are that way, or that out-casted loners make the best characters because they're on the outside looking in, but the cliched nature of the characters did sometimes detract from the emotional content of the story.

The emotional content, by the way, was fantastic. It was incredibly moving and poignant and candid and charming. I could go on for pages, but I think that's enough.

7/8

Things Fall From the Sky

Things Fall From the Sky by Kevin Brockmeier is a book of eleven short stories. I should probably be writing my first review of something easy to review, like a novel, but this book is just too good to push off for later. I think it;s nice to start my blog with a review of a book by my favorite author.

The thing I like about Kevin Brockmeier is how he uses fantasy. So many of his stories are just a tiny bit magical. For example, The Ceiling is about a family, and how the family reacts when the sky starts literally falling. The Passenger is about an existence that occurs entire on an in-flight airplane. Neither one is particular fantastical, but both have enough otherness to them to have a sense of child-like wonder, as if Brockmeier is saying See how beautiful the world is?

That sense of child-like wonder is really at the heart of Things Fall From the Sky. Even the stories that lack the fantastical elements have it. For example, The House at the End of the World is narrated by a small child, for whom the world is new and interesting, and Space uses an unexpected blackout and the night sky to make you aware of the wonder and beauty of the world.

Reading Kevin Brockmeier always makes me see the world as if it is new again. He makes me aware of the beauty and strageness in everything.

8/8