Find Belzhar Created By Meg Wolitzer Offered In Volume

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This story makes a mockery of love, emotional integrity, and mental illness, and it's glamoured by unmagical magical realism, a "sophisticated" literary style, and a twist upon which everything else hinges.
I despise feeling manipulated much as many of the characters in this book would if they had any sense, especially when the plot and writing are not particularly remarkable, and when the characters and relationships are so incredibly shallow and meaningless.


There's an attempt to interject a point to the story in the end, I suppose, but it's only a footnote to this elaborate, heartless exercise in writing technique.


An advance copy was provided by the publisher,



PSour own Kim wrote a thorough, real review with spoilers detailing why the twist is so very problematic here: sitelink themidnightgarden. net/

I also very much like karen's more balancedand very kindreview, sitelink goodreads. com/review/show

I appreciate what Wolitzer has to say about the past, how holding on to a memory or an event and not moving on keeps us from fully living.
The premise is interesting, and I quickly turned the pages to discover the big secret of the novel I guessed incorrectly, I thought everyone had committed suicide and the school and Belzhar was a way of working through what had happened so that they could move on.
. However, the story didn't delve as deeply into character development as I would've liked, especially considering how close the friends were supposed to have become, Въпреки че това е тийн роман и стилът, на който е написан, ми се стори леко детински, все пак се насладих на историята. Напълно нормално и правдоподобно е книгата да е така наивна щом главните герои са тийнейджъри на погодини. Намирам книгата за доста леко и кротко четиво, но и някак силно и ободряващо.
Никой не е застрахован срещу ударите на живота, но ако с нас или някой близък се случи трагедия, нямаме друг избор освен да приемем нещата такива каквито са. Макар и удавени в мъката си, да продължим напред с живота си, защото животът няма да ни чака.

I'd rate this,stars.

You know, I thought this book was pretty fantastic, A little implausible Sure, but I didn't feel like that lessened its appeal or emotional pull,

Jamaica "Jam" Gallahue is reeling from the death of her boyfriend, English exchange student Reeve, Even though they were only together fordays, their feelings for each other were so intense, and Jam is unable to cope with her grief, which upsets her family and alienates her closest friends.
All she wants to do is relive their moments together,

With seemingly no other alternative, Jam's parents send her to The Wooden Barn, a boarding school in Vermont for "emotionally fragile" teenagers, Students are isolated from the outside world, without access to their cell phones or the internet, and are closely monitored for any signs of crisis,

Unbeknownst to her, Jam is enrolled in an exclusive class, Special Topics in English, Each semester, the students in this class are mysteriously handpicked by the teacher with no rhyme or reason, It's a small class devoted to reading only one author the entire semester, While it may seem an odd choice for a school of students with emotional difficulties, this semester they'll be reading the work of Sylvia Plath,

There are four other students in Jam's class, each quite different, but all share the emotional trauma of a particular event that pushed their lives off course, The teacher, Mrs. Quenell, gives them two important assignmentsthey must write in the antique journal she gives each of them and return it at the end of the semester, and they must look out for each other.
Seems easy, and no one can understand why this class is seemingly so exclusive,

But when Jam starts writing in her journal, she finds herself mysteriously transported back to her life with Reeve, She can relive their old memories, feel his arms around her again, and she finally feels safe and happy, Yet each time this happens, it is only for a short period of time, and when it ends, she finds pages of her journal have been inexplicably filledwith her handwriting.
And this happens to each of her fellow students in the classeach is transported back to the moments before the trauma they suffered,

Does Mrs. Quenell know about the journals If they tell her, will she take them away And what happens when the journals fill up The five students form a closeknit bond to try and manage the situation to their best advantage, but they fear that their happiness will only last the semester.
What happens afterward, are they doomed back to their lives of pain and anguish

As I've said numerous times before, I tend to love books that resonate for me emotionally without being manipulative, and Belzhar definitely did.
So many of us can identify with the feelings, if perhaps not the situations, that Jam and her classmates are dealing with, This is a sensitive, thought provoking, beautifully written book about having to make the choice between reliving past memories forever and moving on, and about the power of reading and writing to help us cope with and express our feelings.


Mrs. Quenell says in the book, "Words matter, " And Meg Wolitzer's words really do matter, because they're so well chosen, so well expressed, I enjoyed this book tremendously and can't stop thinking about it, and if it weren't for work, I would have read the entire book in one day, As I mentioned, it's certainly a little implausible, but if you can suspend your disbelief, you'll find Belzhar well worth your while, i had a very medium response to this book, i'm conflicted about a number of its different elements, annoyed/perplexed by others, but also pretty impressed by the big reveal's ability to genuinely surprise me, however, that initial "pleasantly surprised" feeling morphed into additionally conflicted feelings once i processed the turn, so it's all a jumble of contradictory and confusing

feelings,

which means i am in the same emotional state as all the characters in this book, so let's call it a,for that.

this book has several components that are real karengrabbers: smart troubled kids at boarding school, secret historyish situation, magical elements creeping into the everyday this is ordinarily the way to my heart.
and since, after reading sitelinkHow To Be a Heroine, i'd decided to give sitelinkThe Bell Jar another chance to win me over, it seemed timely to read this.
since the title of this book is meant to be pronounced like "bell jar," it led to a couple of confusing conversations: "oh, you're reading sitelinkThe Bell Jar" "no, i'm reading "bellzzjjjhhar" "that's what i said!" oh, the hilarity of miscommunication.
here's another fun conversation i had about this book, this one with greg, upon looking closely at the cover:



"so, this is about sad kids"

DING DING DING!! greg wins the "summarize a book by its cover game!

and i liked it a lot at the beginning.
jam short for "jamaica" is a sixteenyearold girl whose boyfriend, the british exchange student reeve maxfield sooo not in love with the names of characters in this book, died fortyone days after they met, where roughly only half of those days constituted the span of their "relationship.
" a year has passed, and jam is in no way over her grief, she fetishizes this tiny jar of jam get it he gave her, she mopes around the house, staying in bed for days, wearing the same clothes, avoiding her friends, skipping school, and making gloomy pronouncements, like this one in a conversation with her twelveyearold brother.


"It'll suck without you in the house, "

"You'd better get used to it," I said to him, "Our childhood together is pretty much over, "

"That's mean," he said,

"But it's true, And then eventually," I went on, "one of us will die, And the other one will have to go to the funeral, And give a speech. "

dude, bleak,

the reason she's moving out of the house is that she is being sent to vermont to attend "the wooden barn," a therapeutic boarding school for "emotionally fragile, highly intelligent" students where they can recover from "the lingering effects of trauma.
" jam is one of five students chosen to be in a class called "special topics in english" an extremely selective course taught periodically by the formidable mrs, quenell, around which and whom mysterious rumors have always swirled, former students have claimed the class was "lifechanging," but have always been very secretive about why or how, or what the class even studied,

and jam's about to find out,

but first, she's going to moon on and on about her dead boyfriend and her pain, actually, although i snark, i didn't mind this part, i thought it was a very authentic description of a teenager losing their first love, as brief as it was, time is different for teenagers, and the length of a relationship is in no way commensurate to the emotions it inspires,

and her attraction to reeve made sense a shy and quiet "good girl" being seduced by no more than an accent, a slouch, and some skinny black jeans.
i loved that she described his voice as having a "scrape" to it, i loved this paragraph:

He looked like a member of one of those British punk bands from the eighties that my dad still loves, and whose albums he keeps in special plastic sleeves because he's positive they're going to be worth a lot of money someday.
Once I looked up one of my dad's most prized albums on eBay and saw that someone had bid sixteen cents for it, which for some reason made me want to cry.


i thought that was a great detail, because jam is at that age where she is transitioning from a child's wholeworld love for her parents to feeling sorry for them, and protective of them.


but back to reeve, always back to reeve. she spends her time remembering each and every conversation they ever had, greedily sucking the marrow from each precious memory, but she never talks about the day he died, or how it happened. in a school full of emotionallyfraught teenagers i mean, more than your runofthemill emotionallyfraught teenagers, everyone is very respectful of each others' pasts and secrets, and some are more open than others about disclosing how they ended up at the wooden barn.


jam is friendly with her roommate dj, but once she begins attending her special topics in english class, and its mysterious lifechanging experiences begin to manifest, she bonds in a much more cultish way with the other students in the class: marc, casey, griffin, and sierra.
as the year goes on, extraordinary things begin to happen to them, things that can only be discussed with each other, on the first day of class, mrs, quenell enigmatically requests that they "look out for one another," and that's exactly what they do sharing their past and current experiences and being there for each other in that always to me effective breakfast club scenario.




some of the difficulties i had were with the disparity of the characters' trauma, now, i know grief operates on a sliding scale, and everyone has different emotional responses to their experiences, but pitting casey's history against marc's it's not even in the same ballpark.
it's not even the same sport, and when jam's REVEAL is REVEALED at first, it's kind of awesome, i gotta say just because of the shock of it all, and there's that wonderful experience of readjusting your readerthinking and doing that whole, "okay, so where does that leave us" reevaluation, but once i was steadied, i gotta admit, i was much less sympathetic to jam.
and that might make me a monster, but rereading the earlier parts of the book, i find that my bafflement perfectly aligns with the bafflement of jam's former friends, so i think i'm okay.


most of my other niggles were minor, and involve too many plotspecifics to be useful here,

one more positive note: i loved the detail that nothing in belzhar could occur that hadn't happened in the real world, and i absolutely loved the gradual distancing she experienced with reeve how she was moving on in life while he was staying exactly as he had been during their time together, and how his sameness began to bore her despite her equally powerful need to cling to her memory of happiness.
or imagined happiness, as it were, i thought that was a very real depiction both of growing up and outgrowing the things you used to cherish about a person, but also of the healing process itself how, as new experiences accumulate, the pain recedes just a little further, and the memories become bittersweet instead of just bitter.
of course, once the inverted commas are slapped around "memories," it gets messier, and the belzhar experience for jam is just sustaining her delusions and it gets much murkier and more problematic for me.


and one more utterly useless observation i loved how much dj reminded me of my beloved claudia of babysitter's club fame, i mean, except for the eating disorder, although she's japanese okay, half, she hides snacks all over, she dresses cool



how i LONGED for those overalls!

and since she was one of my very first bookcrushes, it's kind of great that dj discovers she likes girls.
claudia i still pine for you!!! and your snacks!! which is not a euphemism i just get the hungries sometimes,

i completely understand why other people had problems with this book, i have problems with it myself, but since it gives such a genuinely aching and occasionally wincing portrayal of allconsuming, obsessive young love, and since it totally "gotcha'd" me with that twist, i can overlook its flaws.
'cuz we all have flaws, even claudia kishi couldn't spell for shit,

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