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Book Review: Too Bright to See by Kyle Lukoff

Too Bright to See by [Kyle Lukoff]

Too Bright to See by Kyle Lukoff

Dial Books, 2021

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593111154

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook  ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

 

Bug lives in a haunted house, but has only felt, not seen, the ghosts. Bug’s uncle and best friend, Roderick, also believed the house was haunted. Now Roderick is dead, leaving Bug and Bug’s mom behind, grieving.

 

It is the summer before sixth grade and Bug’s friend Moira is determined to make both of them over so they can fit in when they start middle school, but Bug doesn’t feel right about makeup and dresses.  Uncle Roderick may be haunting the house, Bug is having nightmares, and everything feels unsettled, scary, and somehow wrong.

 

With the help of Uncle Roderick’s ghost, Bug finally realizes that he is a trans boy. What’s lovely about Lukoff’s book is that, unlike a lot of coming out stories, where the protagonist faces negativity and bullying,  Bug is supported and loved by the people around him: his mom, his friends, his principal, teachers, school, and classmates.  His struggle is in realizing his identity as a trans boy, dealing with his grief over the death of his uncle, and the many changes that come with entering middle school.

 

All The Bright Places is a haunting, perceptive, optimistic story that all middle grade students should be able to relate to. It handles grief, identity, and growing up beautifully: jts designation as a Newbery Honor title is well-deserved. Highly recommended.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on January 28, 2022 by , Reply

Musings: A Ghost Story That Isn’t A Ghost Story: Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

Atheneum, 2017

ISBN-13: 978-1481438254

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

Fifteen-year-old Will’s brother Shawn has just been shot and killed by a member of a local gang. Will knows the rules: don’t cry, don’t snitch, and if someone you love gets killed, find the person who killed them and kill that person. Grieving and angry, he pries open a stuck drawer in his brother’s dresser and takes the loaded gun hidden inside so he can take his revenge. Will lives on the top floor of his apartment building, though, and he has to take the elevator down… and it’s a long way down, because on every floor, Will is forced to face the consequences of living with the rules, and of shooting to kill.

There is absolutely nothing about this book’s front, back, or inside cover that suggests that it is a ghost story.  It is dedicated to teens in detention centers. I didn’t have a clue what it was about when I initially picked it up, I just had read good things about Jason Reynolds and knew the book had won a number of awards, including the Newbery Honor (not sure how I feel about that– the audience for the Newbery is children up to age 14, and Will is 15– this is really YA). But in describing it to my mom, who has an interest in teens and gun violence, I had to explain to her that Will is confronted by ghosts while he is trapped in the elevator(ghosts are a turnoff for her).  Will’s “ghosts” aren’t very ghostly, though, which is one of the things that makes them so disorienting– Will is never quite sure whether they are alive or dead at first.

Long Way Down is a verse novel. There are frequent line breaks and plenty of white space on the page. The language is spare and powerful. Reynolds strips down feelings like grief, shame, anger, and sadness to the essentials by limiting how he puts words down on each page. Despite the pared-down text, Reynolds manages to draw the characters of Will’s ghosts with enough detail and emotional impact that readers will invest in discovering their relationships. Reynolds hasn’t written a horror story here, but it is a gripping and horrific story illustrating how this vicious cycle repeats, and the ambiguous ending is dread-inducing and heart-stopping. Highly recommended for middle, high school, and public libraries, and for readers 14-adult.

Note: Long Way Down has won a Newbery Honor Award, Coretta Scott King Honor Award, a Printz Honor Award, and is a National Book Award finalist.

Posted on December 21, 2018 by , Reply

A Tribute to E.L. Konigsburg

I was saddened to hear of the death of the great children’s and YA novelist, E.L. Konigsburg. While she’s probably best known for her Newbery Award winning novel From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, she also wrote many other powerful novels, and she is the only author to have won both a Newbery Award and a Newbery Honor (for Jennifer, Hecate, William McKinley, Macbeth, and Me, Elizabeth) in the same year (1968). She also won a Newbery for The View from Saturday in 1997.  I discovered and read her books when I was in elementary school and junior high and never really stopped, and as both a children’s librarian and a reader, I’ve never truly put them away again.

I scraped together my pennies to buy (George), the story of a highly gifted child with an imaginary friend– who may or may not really be imaginary. I journeyed to an 800 number with the buttoned-up Maximilian, on his erratic travels across the country with his father (and a camel). I discovered the imperfect life and loves of Eleanor of Aquitaine in A Proud Taste of Scarlet and Miniver. I wondered who the mysterious Caroline really was in Father’s Arcane Daughter.

Years later, the mystery and horror at the heart of Silent to the Bone mesmerized me (it is a horrifying enough story that we’ve reviewed it here). Margaret, a minor character in that book, is the hero in The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place, a story of hope, love, and change. Of course, the award winners are wonderful books as well, and From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is the one everyone remembers, but with stories that ranged from quirky, funny, and fantastic to touching, thoughtful, mysterious, and even terrifying (sometimes in the same book), there were many choices.

I’m thankful for every time I read something she had written and felt that click that said “that’s me!” For every time she introduced me to someone who lived life in a very different way, or made an escape possible for me without my having to run off to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to change my life. Even if E.L. Konigsburg isn’t an author who touched your life, if you are a book lover (and you probably are, if you’re reading this) there probably is an author who did. Today is a good day to remember the door to books that author opened to you.

Posted on April 21, 2013 by , Reply