Review: Shug

SHUG
Jenny Han
Aladdin

Annemarie Wilcox, or "Shug" (as in Sugar) as her mom calls her, is twelve years old and in love with her oldest friend (Mark) the boy she's grown up riding bikes with and whose mother she often wishes were her own. But when junior high starts her new feelings toward Mark, as well as the new social structure that comes with her new school, makes things so much more complicated than they used to be. With her mom's drinking, her parents' fighting, nothing is as easy as it used to be.

It's been a while since I've read a really good middle grade novel and Shug reminded me of all the things I love about the genre. The book is not about just one thing. It's not Annemarie's crush on Mark or her struggle with the popular girls or her relationship with her mother or the faultlines that have begun to show in her family. This book is about all of that, along with Annemarie's insecurity -- the kind that often comes when you're on the brink of teenagedom and everything is changing. Set in a small, Southern town, the setting gives Annemarie's story a more old-fashioned feel, as if it could be taking place decades ago instead of in the 21st century. This, I liked. It may just be me, but middle grade is one genre where I love when it seems a bit older, a bit timeless. Most of my favorite MG books have been unmoored in this way.

Annemarie is an authentic pre-teen whose struggles with herself and those around her ring true. This book takes a simple approach to some serious subjects such as family dysfunction and alcoholism. There were some heartbreaking moments that, because of how they were written, felt neither heavy nor trite. They fit.

For many of the storylines in this book, there's no neatly wrapped-up ending. There's a sense of moving on, but nothing that you'd traditionally think of as closure, but that works here because the problems Annemarie is facing are life's problems and they aren't ones that are resolved yet. This is a book I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to young readers.

Review: We'll Always Have Summer

WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE SUMMER
Jenny Han
Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing

This review includes spoilers for the first two books in the Summer series - The Summer I Turned Pretty and It's Not Summer Without You.

I'm a little torn by this book. Picking up two years after the end of It's Not Summer Without You, Belly and Jeremiah are now established as a couple and Conrad is on the other side of the country. However, when Belly and Jeremiah decide to get married at the end of the summer, Conrad realizes that he's losing Belly for good. Whereas in the second book there were chapters told from Jeremiah's POV, this time Conrad had a few chapters from his perspective. As with Jeremiah's chapters before, I loved this and really think it lent more understanding to Conrad's character and some of his past actions.

This book - at least in the beginning - was so different from the previous two Summer books. It begins with Belly, Jeremiah, and Taylor (Belly's best friend) at college and it takes quite a while for the setting to even approach the beach. Because of this and the fact that for so long Conrad wasn't around, the book felt off-kilter to me. I love Belly and Jeremiah, of course, but so much of this book took place during their "normal" lives which took away some of the spark that these books have. The real story, for me, began when Belly, Jeremiah, and Conrad ended up at the beach house as Belly and Jeremiah plan their end-of-summer wedding. Conrad's feelings for Belly make it difficult for him to be around the happy couple even as Belly, having moved on from him, is completely oblivious.

There were a few things here that disappointed me, if I'm being honest. While Jeremiah was always a carefree, goofy guy, that's taken to an extreme in this book as he becomes a total frat boy. Previously he was sweet and responsible, however he seems to have morphed into a more uncaring character. At many points during the book I sat there wondering what had happened to sweet, wonderful Jeremiah, and I felt as if the author had made him less likable for the sake of the love triangle, in order to show Conrad in a better light and put the Jeremiah/Belly relationship in question. I missed the old Jeremiah and was disappointed with his character this time around. I often felt that Jeremiah and Belly, though I'd been rooting for them to get together, lacked chemistry.

Belly's still naive, still stubborn, and once again it feels in some ways like she's trying to catch up to the boys. Or, in this case, keep them. Her summer family has dispersed with Conrad attending college in California and their summers at Cousins having fallen by the wayside. There's a nostalgia for the old days and while it often seems as if Belly might not feel it, it's shown in the characters' interactions and the infrequent flashbacks. The emotions here are just as crisp and all-consuming as they are in the previous books, a quality that I absolutely love. Belly's world has widened and no longer belongs only to her summer family but still the scenes with them are the sharpest and best in the book.

I feel compelled to mention that though this book had a few faults that bothered me, it was still excellent. The ending itself was absolutely perfect despite not being what I was expecting.

Review: It's Not Summer Without You

IT'S NOT SUMMER WITHOUT YOU
Jenny Han
Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing

This review includes spoilers for The Summer I Turned Pretty, the first book of Jenny Han's Summer series.

A lot has happened to Belly and her summer boys since we last saw them. Belly and her one true love, Conrad, had a sort-of romance that ended badly. More importantly, however, Susannah's cancer killed her. So this summer, there's no Cousin's Beach and Belly's spending her time enduring best-friend Taylor's attempts to help her "get over" Conrad and come back to the land of the living. But Belly isn't just mourning her relationship with Conrad, but also Susannah, the woman she used to wish was her own mother. And when Jeremiah calls out of the blue, telling Belly that Conrad's skipped out on his summer classes to bum around at the beach house, she immediately joins him in bringing Conrad back. But Conrad's actions are more complex and this summer of loss is more complicated than Belly could have expected.

Unlike the first book in the series, this one isn't narrated solely by Belly; there are also short chapters narrated by Jeremiah, which was surprising, but allowed for a greater understanding of these characters and their world. For the first time we see - from one of the brother's POV - the feelings that Jeremiah has for Belly and, in a small way, the way that the rest of the characters view her. While in the first book Belly often comes across as whiny and sometimes babyish, it's clear that she's matured in the months that have passed. Though there's a part of her (a large part, sure) that wants to get Conrad back and is still hopelessly in love with him, she's at the summer house more to help and support the boys than anything else. The loss of her unique relationship with Susannah has hurt and changed her, which we see here when she repeatedly steps up to the plate to help her summer family despite the complex and often hurtful emotions under the surface. Belly is no longer the baby, and she's no longer playing catch-up.

The things that were great in the first novel - the setting and crisp emotions - are just as great here. There's a sense of nostalgia and bittersweet longing as Belly, Jeremiah, and Conrad come together despite the past. Belly's relationships and personality is more rounded-out now that her best friend, Taylor, is a bigger part of the story and we get to see a larger part of her life. While I would have expected this to dull the impact of Belly's emotions, it instead serves to highlight them and even make them more understandable. We now have a history with Belly and her summer family, which makes it so much easier to understand her complex, obsessive feelings when it comes to the boys, especially Conrad. Jeremiah's narration adds another level to this novel; now we have not only what Belly thinks and feels, but also Jeremiah. It makes things clearer and adds to the complexity and emotional intensity of the ongoing story.

In the first book, I always felt that there was something of a disconnect between the characters and the reader; in this book, that disconnect is gone. Now we know these characters and their world; it's not foreign or strange, and it's so much easier to fall into the story, fall in step with Belly and Jeremiah as they head off to rescue Conrad from his own self-destructive behavior.

It's no secret that I often have problems with sequels or series, especially in the contemporary genre. But this one? Not only is it a worthy successor to The Summer I Turned Pretty, but it makes for a completely emotional and engrossing ongoing story. When I read the first book I didn't quite understand why it was being written as the start of a series instead of a stand-alone, but now that I've read the second one I'm amazed by how well the series works. It's brilliant and I'm so excited to read the third and last book. As for the love triangle aspect of the series, I think it's painful and emotional, but also really beautiful and true to the characters and their world. Han has written such believable and heart-aching dynamics that it seems completely reasonable and somewhat unavoidable to have a love triangle emerge.

Review: The Summer I Turned Pretty

THE SUMMER I TURNED PRETTY
Jenny Han

Historically, ever since reading THE LIGHTKEEPER'S DAUGHTER by Iain Lawrence, when I was a child, novels set at the beach have given me a feeling I can only descirbe as: weird and uncomfortable. Similar to waking up from a disturbing dream, except in real life. THE SUMMER I TURNED PRETTY is only the second I've read that didn't leave me with that feeling, which is a feat in itself. The premise -- a girl (Belly) who has spent every summer at the beach with her mother, brother, her mother's best friend and two sons -- is one that I love. Especially since Belly has been in love with the older son, Conrad, since she was ten years old while she's always thought of Jeremiah as more of a best friend or brother to her. The premise is an exceptionally strong one, but the characterizations often fall flat. This book picks up and drops the reader in the middle of what really are the biggest and most important relationships in the narrator's life. Belly knows these people -- Conrad, Jeremiah, their mother Susannah -- so well, but the reader doesn't know them at all. And as much as the characters are described there was still a foggy disconnect that remained throughout the book. The narration spends a lot of time telling us who these characters are and not enough letting us actually get to know them. I loved the Belly/Jeremiah dynamic, but kept wishing for more scenes between her and Conrad. The few we had really only gave short snapshots of who these characters were and the relationship they had. In the case of this book this gave me the very distinct feeling that everything I was reading about was monumentally huge to Belly but somehow it wasn't coming through as clear as i wanted it to.

Usually this disconnect of characterization would turn me off to a book, but this was the exception. The story here, about Belly's "summer family" as she calls them, about this boy she's always loved, about her mother's best friend who's in remission after surviving breast cancer, is so brilliant. So beautiful and important to Belly that I could understand the disconnect. Because it wasn't just the reader who was disconnected in this summer book, but everybody. The summer and its story are covered in a thin haze and though this won't work for every reader, it worked for me. The setting here is vivid, as beach settings usually are. Belly comes off as a bit of a whiner, constantly complaining and feeling left out, but though it was annoying at times, it was also very honest and easy to understand why. Because for most of her life, Belly has been left out of the boys' fun, and she's sick of it. Immature? Sure, but believably so.

What comes through more than anything in this summer novel is the sometimes-complex and sometimes-simple emotions. From her feelings about Conrad to the way she thinks of her "summer family" and her mother's best friend Susannah in particular, the emotions here are crisp even if everything else has a hazy edge. This story takes us out of the normal cycle of life, out of friends that are attached to school or church or work, and drops us into the emotions and relationships that survive even after long absences, that our everyday life sometimes seems to be orbiting around, or waiting for. It is a story of, as the book puts it, "forever friends," and for that I love it.