I've gotten used to the dead parents face. I've gotten used to living with my gymnastics coach. I've even adjusted to sharing a bathroom with his way-too-hot son. Dealing with boys is not something that's made it onto my list of experiences as of yet. But here I am, doing it. And something about Jordan--being around him, talking to him, thinking about him--makes me feel like I can finally breathe again. That's something I haven't been able to do lately. He knows what it feels like to be me right now. He knows what it's like to wonder--what now? I think about it constantly. I need answers. I need to know how to get through this. In the gym, if you're struggling, you train harder, you do drills and conditioning. How do I work hard at moving on? At being on my own? And what happens if I might be...maybe...probably falling for Jordan? I mean we live together now. That can't happen, can it? But kissing him...well, let's just say it's not an easy activity to forget.
This book was given to me in return for a review.
Letters to Nowhere is exactly the kind of book I’ve been
looking for. Well, I won’t say exactly because it’s not as if it’s completely
cookie-cutter within its genre and sub-genres, but I mean in terms of what the
main character is going through: grief.
Karen is a griever, and a very passionate one; she doesn’t just accept
that her parents are dead and move on.
She fights between what she wants and what her parents wanted for her,
trying to decide if she should honor a plan they had worked out for her or just
go full-tilt on her elite gymnast career now that she’s living with her coach
and there’s no one to stop her or tell her that she should keep her options
open.
At its core, it is a pretty good book. It does get rather heavy on the gymnastics
language and it isn’t always easy to get through or visualize, speaking as someone
who knows absolutely nothing about gymnastics.
Of course fans of reading who also like gymnastics will pick this up so
I can’t say it’s an entirely bad thing that the author doesn’t water-down the
language; do it too much and it makes it look more like you simply threw it in
as a gimmick and didn’t bother to do much more than a Wikipedia search about
some names and moves.
The book is, however, a little scattered; some details don’t
match up with what was said earlier, or kept consistent. When Karen is worried about her period, for
instance, she seems to flop between thinking it’s normal for girls to not have
their period until seventeen, casually saying that probably only Stevie has it
and then only for a few years (at nineteen) and saying she knew it was abnormal
but that her parents had told her there was nothing to worry about. Considering excessive exercise is something
that can delay a girl’s period, Karen’s parents and coach probably should’ve
been worried about it a long time ago (she spends hours a day in the gym, to
the point where she’s there more during her waking hours than she is anywhere
else). Yet when Jordan shows her the
records his father has on her, all it says is that they should start giving her
a calcium supplement, which they apparently never did because she doesn’t say
something like “Oh so that’s why.” And then she does finally get her period and
it’s never mentioned again. Cross was
clearly going somewhere with it both as part of Karen’s character and probably
as what might be a common experience for young gymnasts, but there just wasn’t
enough there to make it worth it in the long run. The book also seems to flip-flop between
whether it wants Stevie as an antagonist or not, but that might be more a mix
between Karen’s own thought processes and undecided characterization that wasn’t
quite resolved in edits. I realize that
a good character has layers to them and they don’t always react to everything
the same way, but Stevie does seem inconsistent to me to the point where I
wonder if Cross had several ideas for her during the process and couldn’t
decide in the end.
Still, it’s a clever and sometime heartbreaking book, and I’d
definitely recommend it. So happy
reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment