Tshepiso Ramodimoosi

I really enjoyed Final Draft by Riley Redgate. I picked this book up basically on a whim and ended up connecting with the main character’s story much more than I thought I would. In this novel we follow Laila: high school senior, aspiring author, confused pansexual. The first person narrative takes us through her hopes, insecurities, and feelings on just about everything as she fights for the approval of her distant creative writing teacher and attempts to create a memorable senior year. A large part of why I really liked this book was how much I connected to Laila. Her story reflects my experiences as a teenager. Redgate captured the complete confusion that surrounds being a teenager perfectly. From the intense pressure Laila puts on her self for academic achievement, to the feeling of distance and out-of-place-ness she feels about her Ecuadorian heritage. I could just feel Laila’s feelings because I understood her. Redgate is one of the few authors who really capture female sexual frustration and guilt in a really authentic way. As you can tell from my gushy paragraph, Redgate tackles many different themes and topics in this tinsey book. But, each topic explored never feels underdeveloped or rushed. We get a clear image into a teenager’s brain in this book and Redgate captures it well. I became much more attached to the side characters than I was anticipating. My standouts in this read were Mr. Madison, the most wholesome book character I’ve ever read in my entire life, Hannah, a character I was prepared to dislike (ya girl does not deal with abrasive edgelord well), but she was such a fully formed person with more layers than expected. Laila’s romance with Hannah felt genuine and was steeped in realistic teenage melodrama without feeling overblown. I’m going to end this review with some quotes that just HIT me while I was reading: "Her inexperience didn’t feel charming or virtuous, like she was some good-girl persona from a movie. It felt furious and heated, humiliating and childish, as if physicality were a language she was supposed to have learned, and here she was in senior year, surrounded by a horde of native speakers, unable to translate the most basic concepts." "Laila felt guilt and embarrassment and regret in metric tons, carried over years too long. That was residual Catholicism for you." "If anybody were to ask her how it felt, being mixed, she knew how she would answer. It was the feeling that even in the quietest and most personal place, a score had been assigned to her, a mark calculated to gauge authenticity or ownership, and just as in every other coldly numerical analysis, 50 percent would never be a passing mark. But who was going to ask?" "If time travel were an option, actually, she would rewind through the last twelve years and tell her child self to take her dad’s impromptu language coaching more seriously. […] Now her Spanish was so fragmented that she could barely talk to Tía Graciela when her father inevitably passed his phone conversations to her" Stars 🌟🌟🌟🌟 Final Draft was just great. I’ve never felt as known by a book than I did in this one. Riley Redgate is a stellar writer and I can’t wait to check out more of her work in the future.

I adored Circe by Madeline Miller. I was hooked from the first chapter into this intensely atmospheric and powerful story. This book worked its way into my bones and rooted into my heart. Circe follows the Greek goddess and daughter of Helios of the same name. We see her from her birth and through every major event in her life. The story is intensely character focused with strong feminist themes as our protagonists recounts and reflects on her life. Miller’s writing is straight up beautiful. Describing a writing style as lyrical is always a dangerous game because I can see people imagining dense paragraphs filled to the brim with complex words and run-on sentences. Miller isn’t like that at ALL, her prose is as light as air, and her descriptions exacting. Her diction is sharp and most importantly her words feel like ancient Greece. She captures the hellenistic period perfectly I just need to give you an example so you can see it yourself: We lit no tapers. The room was dark and warm from the day’s heat. Shadows draped the bed. No frogs sounded, no birds called. It was as if we had found the still heart of the universe. Nothing moved except for us. Doesn’t that just make you swoon. Miller was also a master of framing in this story. She took tales we already knew, Odysseus’ stay in Aiaia, the birth of the Minotaur, Jason and Madea, and places them in new and interesting contexts. We get to see classic characters not only reimagined, but deepened. Miller weaves these classic tales into something fresh, new, and amazing. She gives the women in these stories more agency and character than the original greek texts provided them. Stars 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 I know this review is painfully short, but I don’t know what more to say in praise of this amazing book. I’d just end up gushing ineloquently for 5 hours. Madeline Miller is a Goddess and I beg anyone with even a slight interest in the story to pick it up IMMEDIATELY!

I’ve FINALLY read another book by Jandy Nelson and it was good. The Sky Is Everywhere was everything I wanted it to be and more. Excellent prose, relatable characters, and the sense of what it feels like to be a teenager. The Sky is Everywhere follows Lennie Walker weeks after the unexpected passing of her older sister, Bailey. This book closely follows the grief Lennie deals with as well as the romantic entanglements that come soon after the death of her sister. Jandy Nelson is an excellent writer. Her prose is melodious and transforming, her characters feel real enough to touch, but, what always stands out to me about her writing is her excellent ambiance. From the rich earthy forests of northern California, to the blinding grief the takes center stage throughout this book. I adore her prose and the only way to easily convey that is with an example. “Grief is forever. It doesn’t go away; it becomes part of you, step for step, breath for breath.” The Sky is Everywhere was an emotional book. Every feeling portrayed of the page was big and sweeping and nothing was ever experienced in halves by Lennie. Declarations of undying love to boys you barely know and sobbing every other page may not be for everyone, but no matter how melodramatic the romance was in this book it alway felt genuine. Nelson knows how to expertly capture the bombastic feeling of being a teenager. This book is messy. Not in its craft, but in its portrayal of life. No character, especially Lennie, is exempt from being selfish and thoughtless. The choices she makes are questionable at best, but I always felt I understood Lennie. This made me really connect with her and a lot of her thought processes were some of the most relatable moments I’ve read. Stars 🌟🌟🌟🌟 The Sky is Everywhere did not disappoint, while not as clean as Nelson’s later work it was still an outstanding debut. I can’t wait to see what else Nelson has in store, because I have a feeling it’ll be great.