Books

So 'The Coin' by Yasmin Zaher is due back at the library, and I am really struggling to get anything done so this is a whizz through a few books from July. This was some weird shit. Another Palestinian character (after Enter Ghost a couple of months ago), but living in New York and obsessed with cleanliness and designer labels. Note to self : try writing a note to yourself about when and why you request a book from the library; I have no idea why I ordered this. I reiterate, it was weird shit. Loved the flip book on the edges of the pages though, of a coin spinning: I tried to make a film of it but couldn't get the pages to run smoothly. 

'Your Neighbour's Table' by Gu Byeong-mo was the book club book for July. Interesting discussion was had as usual but I did not like this book. Originally in Korean, it is a strange tale of 'communal living', arranged by the government in subsidised accommodation to 'encourage' young couples to have more children. It didn't really tackle the issue of why people are not having children, nor what countries might do about low birth rates; maybe treat women with more respect springs to mind. A bunch of useless husbands and stressed wives share a block of flats and struggle to get to know each other, let alone like each other. 

'Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil' by Oliver Darkshire (who has no website) was bought for my granddaughter Aisla. A brilliant disturbing plot with magic and goblins (who appear to be a fungal based lifeform) and layabout husbands (I see a theme developing) and a pot of basil. Isabella is a heroine for our times indeed. Aspects of the humour are very Terry Pratchett but in no way a steal of his style. Particularly liked the footnotes. Totally loved it ... and hope she does too.

'Case Histories' by Kate Atkinson is my second foray into Jackson Brodie. I was rather snooty about him last time, back to 2009 but I loved this one. Engaging characters, convoluted plot that all pulled together believably. 

Little quote here:

"Julia embarked own a second cup of tea. It was too hot for tea; Jackson longed for an ice-cold beer. Julia's white teacup bore the imprint of her mouth in lipstick and Jackson experienced a sudden memory of his sister. she had worn a less strident colour, a pastel pink, and on every cup and glass she ever drank from she left behind the ghostly transfer of her lips. The thought of Niamh made his heart feel heavy in his chest, literally, not metaphorically." (p.157)

But the moment that caught my eye was this one, after a particularly grisly murder:

"If she could have one wish - if her fairy godmother (noticeably absent from her life so far) were to suddenly appear in the cold living room of the cottage and offer to grant her whatever she wanted - Michelle knew exactly what she would ask for. She would ask to go back to the beginning of her life and start all over again." (p.68)

Because this is the exact plot of 'Life After Life' that she published in 2013.

Stay safe. Be kind. 

THUG

I have been reading. Not a lot, and very slowly, but there is still reading happening here. I read a review of 'The Hate You Give' by Angie Thomas and the library had a handy copy. It is the story of a young black girl who witnesses the shooting of her friend, and the repercussions it has for herself, her family and her community. But it is also a book about an adolescent struggling with growing up, and deciding who she is, and who she wants to be. Her parents choose to live in a rough part of town, because they see so many decent people abandoning the area and they want to resist the encroachment of the gang culture, but they send Starr, Sekani and Seven to a private, mostly white, school. Starr finds herself torn between the person she is at home and the way she find herself behaving at school to make herself acceptable to her friends. It is a very intense, highly charged book. You feel the tension rising within the community as they see the police officer involved absolved of responsibility for the shooting, and the tension rising for Starr as she feels unable to even acknowledge what has happened or express her anger within the confines of school. Add into the mix a young man asking her father for help to escape a gang and an uncle who is also a police officer, and things get very mixed up. While the repeated references to and adoration of trainer brands was irritating, it was just teenage stuff and I'm a middle aged fuddy-duddy who doesn't get any of that kind of thing. What was so vivid about the writing was Starr's emotional turmoil, and fear, and constant awareness of her vulnerability. There is much on the news in recent years, with random shootings of young black men, about relations between the police and the black community, and as a white person you just can't get your head about what it must be like to be afraid of the police, to view them as a group not to be trusted. This is a story to help you get past that. I still don't know what it's like, but this passage, which is quite long, made me literally shake with anger at the injustice. It is the use of the word 'boy' that is particularly insidious, used during slavery and beyond to demean black men, and used here by a black police man. Everyone inside the system is inculcated into its way of thinking and behaving. Here Maverick and Mr Lewis are just talking outside their respective shops when the police arrive and begin the question what they are doing:

"The black officer looks at him. 'Get on the ground, hands behind your back.'
'But ...'
'On the ground, face-down!' he yells. 'Now!'
Daddy looks at us. His expression apologises for the fact that we have to see this.
He gets down on one knee and lowers himself on the ground, face-down. His hands go behind his back, and his fingers interlock.
Where's that camera operator now? Why can't this be on the news?
'Now, wait a minute, Officer,' Mr Lewis says. 'Me and him were just talking.'
'Sir, go inside,' the white cop tells him.
'But he didn't do anything!' Seven says.
'Boy, go inside!' the black cop says.
'No! that's my father, and ...'
'Seven!' Daddy yells.
Even though he's lying on the concrete, there's enough authority in his voice to make Seven shut up.
The black officer checks Daddy while his partner glances around at all of the onlookers. There's quite a few of us now. Ms Yvette and a couple of her clients stand in her doorway, towels around the clients' shoulders. A car has stopped in the street.
'Everyone, go about your own business,' the white one says.
'No, sir,' says Tim. 'This is our business.'
The black cop keeps his knee on Daddy's back as he searches him. He pats him down once, twice, three times, just like One-Fifteen did Khalil. Nothing.
'Larry,' the white cop says.
The black one, who must be Larry, looks up at him, then at all the people who have gathered around.
Larry takes his knee off Daddy's back and stands. 'Get up,' he says.
Slowly, Daddy gets to his feet.
Larry glances at me. Bile pools in my mouth. He turns to Daddy and says, 'I'm keeping as eye on you, boy. Remember that.'
Daddy's jaw looks rock hard.
The cops drive off. The car that had stopped in the street leaves, and all the onlookers go on about their business. One person hollers out, 'It's all right Maverick.'
Daddy looks at the sky and blinks the way I do when I don't wanna cry. He clenches and unclenches his hands.
Mr Lewis touches his back. 'C'mon, son.'
He guides Daddy our way, but they pass us and go back into the store." (p.190-192)

Down Among the Sticks and Bones

This book, on the other hand, I finished the other day. I must try and keep up to date with the reviews or the system falls apart (system??? what system?). Somebody recommended it, and there it was in the library catalogue. 'Down Among the Sticks and Bones' by Seanan McGuire is a prequel to 'Every Heart a Doorway', which I might or might not get around to reading. She writes a lot of fantasy series and if you're into that kind of thing then you will probably enjoy her writing. While I did eventually get engaged in the narrative the story spent the first forty pages or so making a very laboured point about enforced gender roles and parental expectations, a theme which persisted through the story. Jack and Jill escape the confines of their stifling parents through a trapdoor in their grandmother's trunk, that takes them down to a surreal underworld populated by vampires and mad scientists. Instead of sticking together in this alien environment they are driven apart by conflicting desires and find themselves on opposite sides of a longstanding feud. The two girls eventually develop some personality of their own, but are still confined by the expectations of their new protectors. 

"The man smiled. His teeth were as white as his lips were red, and for the first time, the contrast seemed to put some color into his skin. 'Oh, this will be fun,' he said, and opened the iron door.
On the other side was a hall. It was a perfectly normal hall, as subterranean castle halls went: the walls were stone, the floor was carpeted in faded red and black filigree, and the chandeliers that hung from the ceiling were rich with spider webs, tangled perilously close to the burning candles. The man stepped through. Jack and Jill, lacking any better options, followed him.
See them now as there were then, two golden-haired little girls in torn and muddy clothes, following a spotless stranger through a castle. See how he moves, as fluid as a hunting cat, his feet barely seeming to brush the ground, and how the children hurry to keep up with him, almost tripping over themselves in their eagerness to not be left behind! They are still holding each others's hands, our lost little girls, but already Jack is beginning to lag a little, suspicious of their host, wary of what happens when the three days are done.
They are not twins who have been taught the importance of cleaving to each other, and the cracks between them are already beginning to show. It will not be long before they are separated." (p.70-1)

So, in the new world the 'girly' one gets to toughen up and get dirty, and the 'tomboy' gets to dress pretty, so they don't really escape anything. It all felt a bit lame and added nothing to what could have been a good story about the bonds of sisterhood. I think I will probably stick to writing for grown ups.

The Fault in Our Stars (not an A to Z post)

This is a quickie, because surely everyone in the book blog universe loves John Green and has already read 'The Fault in Our Stars'. I have reviewed 'Paper Towns' and 'Looking for Alaska' previously, and loved this one just as much. He manages to achieve very authentic voices for his young people, you care about them straight away, and I just allowed myself to get sucked right into this story that I was convinced in advance was going to make me cry. It did. I think it also very convincingly tackles ideas about mortality, and how one faces it; although for young cancer sufferers it is rather more urgent than for most people I think the issue is one that confronts us all in the end. I can also totally sympathise with the idea that when you love a book you want to ask the author all sorts of awkward questions. He manages to make you care and be sad without ever becoming mawkish, so huge kudos for that because I hate manipulative sentimentality.

" 'How's your friend Isaac?'
'Blind,' I said.
'You're being very teenagery today,' Mom said. She seemed annoyed about it.
'Isn't this what you wanted, Mom? For me to be teenagery?'
'Well, not necessarily this kinda teenagery, but of course your father and I are excited to see you become a young woman, making friends, going on dates.'
'I'm not going on dates,' I said. 'I don't want to go on dates with anyone. It's a terrible idea and a huge waste of time and -'
'Honey,' my mom said. 'What's wrong?'
'I'm like. Like. I'm like a grenade, Mom. I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimise the casualties , okay?' " (p.99)

Till Dawn Do Us Part

Al bought me copy of 'Paper Towns' by John Green to comfort me in my houseboundness and it was lovely.

SPOILER ALERT
I just want to be sure that people who haven't read it yet avoid any info that will ruin the story disclosure. I was alternately convinced our hero Margo was dead and then alive and then dead and then ... I have not read 'The Fault in our Stars' but I did review 'Looking for Alaska' a few years ago, and it has a similar focus on a quirky female character on whom the male lead has a crush, and who's presence and then absence forms the structure of the book. Q (Quentin), Radar and Ben are on the verge of graduating from high school, living in their secluded little world of video games and band practice and somehow managing to say out of the path of the resident bully. Radar has a nicely understated relationship with a girl called Angela, Ben is searching frantically for a 'honeybunny' to take to prom and Q just longs for the lost days of his childhood when Margo Roth Spiegelman was his best friend. As the end of their school career approaches they are all anticipation of their new adult lives, college and the future, but Margo is about to throw a spanner in the works. After she discovers her boyfriend's infidelity she enlists Q's help for a wild night of revenge on the people who have wronged her, and just when he thinks they may have reforged their former bond she vanishes. What ensues is a race to make sense of the clues she appears to have left behind. So does Margo want to be found or not?

Lovely things about the book: Q struggling to understand Walt Whitman, that inspired me to give it another go. Friendships between young people and their culture generally being presented in a positive, non-judgemental way, and the adults all being somewhat extraneous to the story. The 'dork' hits it off with the 'super hot girl' and they both defy their stereotypes, grow as characters and get to know each other as real people. Some lovely backhand comments about the schooling system, it's always good when authors see through the crap. The road trip, because who doesn't love a road trip. The suspense. The avoidance of a clichéd ending. 

Ben understanding Lacey:
"I'm just saying that it was easy for me to like Lacey before. It's easy to like someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing unattainable thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl with a weird relationship with food and frequent crankiness who's kinda bossy - then I had to basically start liking a whole different person." (p.267)

Q in school:
"I spent the next three hours in classrooms, trying not to look at the clocks above various blackboards, and then looking at the clocks, and then being amazed that only a few minutes had passed since I had last looked at the clock. I'd had nearly four years of experience looking at these clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight to the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years." (p.18)

I liked Margo, because she's not taken in by her own hype:
"Q, you're going to go to Duke. You're going to be a very successful lawyer-or-something and get married and have babies and live your whole little life, and then you're going to die, and in your last moments, when you're choking on your own bile in the nursing home, you'll say to yourself: 'Well, I wasted my whole goddamned life, but at least I broke into SeaWorld with Margo Roth Spiegelman my senior year of high school. At least I carpe'd that one diem." (p.70)

because a few pages later:
"Margo didn't respond. She was staring past me, her eyes squinting almost closed. 'I felt this exact same way when I got into Universal Studios,' she said after a moment. 'It's kind of cool and everything, but there's nothing much to see. The rides aren't working. Everything cool is locked up. Most of the animals are put in different tanks at night.' She turned her head and appraised the SeaWorld we could see. 'I guess the pleasure isn't being inside.'
'What's the pleasure then?' I asked.
'Planning, I guess. I don't know. Doing stuff never feels as good as you hope it will feel.' " (p.77)

Here Q empties his locker on the last school day, and seems to get some idea of what Margo is trying to tell him:
"All along, I kept thinking, I will never do this again, I will never be here again, this will never be my locker again, Radar and I will never write notes in calculus again, I will never see Margo across the hall again. This was the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again.
...
As paralysing and upsetting as all the never agains were, the final leaving felt perfect. Pure. The most distilled possible form of liberation. Everything that mattered except one lousy picture was in the trash, but it felt so great. I started jogging, wanting to put even more distance between myself and school.
It is so hard to leave - until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamn thing in the world.
As I ran, I felt myself for the first time becoming like Margo. I knew: she is not in Orlando. She is not in Florida. Leaving feels too good, once you leave. If I'd been in a car, and not on foot, I might have kept going, too. She was gone and not coming back for graduation or anything else. I felt sure of that now.
I leave, and the leaving is so exhilarating I know I can never go back. But what then? Do I just keep leaving places, and leaving them, and leaving them, tramping a perpetual journey?
Ben and Radar drove past me a quarter of a mile from Jefferson Park, and Ben brought RHAPAW to a screeching halt right on Lakemont in spite of traffic everywhere, and I ran up to the car and got in. They wanted to play Resurrection at my house, but I had to tell them no, because I was closer that I'd ever been." (p228-9)

I have never read a book where they talked so much about needing to pee, and it was fecking hysterical. It worked perfectly as a distraction from talking about where they were going too much, acting (weirdly) to both lessen and heighten the tension of the situation. John Green always does exactly what he says on the tin, rely on him for a bloody good story.

All the world's a stage

Creature and I started reading 'The Rehearsal' by Eleanor Catton when mum first sent it for her several years ago, but then it was abandoned on her bookshelf. I picked it out for the Read-a-thon partly because her most recent offering had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (which it has since won). This is such a clever book because it constantly subverts what the reader thinks they know about the story and the people in it. Scenes are played, but then the people in them appear to 'step out of character' and be someone else, who is merely playing the role. We are following one story, but then are following the people who are telling that story, but then even that telling becomes unreliable, and then, because some of the story takes place in a drama school there are all sorts of other performances being rehearsed and acted out. And then there is this enigmatic saxophone teacher (unnamed) who acts a little like god, watching over the whole performance, trying to extract the 'truth' from some of the main players, but also trying to interfere and influence events and characters. Life is all about playing roles, and we all play different parts depending on the situation and the people we are with. People talk about the idea that you can only be 'the real you' with close friends and we tell our children to 'be themselves' when trying to make friends. The language of pretence and acting is all around us in our daily lives. This book really makes you think about how much of human behaviour is just playing a role. I liked it because nothing was straightforward or quite the way it appeared, that it felt like the reader is being taken for a ride, but you don't really mind because the view is fascinating.

Lots of quotes coming up just to give examples of why it was such an interesting read. Here Isolde and Julia are at a concert with the saxophone teacher, and Isolde is getting a closer look at the girl that the others in her year talk about:

"Her cardigan is buttoned with gold dome buttons and is unravelling slightly at the hem, giving her a careless scholarly look that makes Isolde feel young and clumsy and naive. She is wearing a silver turquoise ring on her ink-stained nail-bitten fingers, and tight-knit fishnet stockings underneath her skirt. Isolde drinks it all in and then feels oddly disappointed, looking at this newer, more complete version of Julia who is a whole person and not just an idea of a person. She feels jealous and excluded and even betrayed, as if Julia has no right to exist beyond Isolde's experience of her." (p.142)

And this one that follows a few pages later, and both of which touch on the idea of self-knowledge, and the individual's perception of reality and how we never know if what we perceive is 'real':

"Isolde thinks how strange it is, that every person in the auditorium is locked in their own private experience of the music, alone with their thoughts, alone with their enjoyment or distaste, and shivering at the vast feeling of intimacy that this solitude affords, already impatient for the interval when they can compare their experience with their neighbour's and discover with relief that they are the same. Am I hearing the same thing they are hearing? Isolde wonders half-heartedly, but she is distracted from pursuing the thought any further, turning her attention instead to watch an elderly woman in the stalls flounder noisily in her handbag for a tissue or mint." (p.144)

The main thrust of the story is about an affair between a male teacher and an older pupil, Isolde's sister Victoria, but partly it uses the idea of sexual experience as some kind of symbolic crossing point from youth into adulthood:

"Isolde hasn't yet learned to drive and Julia's offer makes her feel young and inexperienced and graceless, as if she is being forced to reveal that she can't read or that she is still afraid of the dark. The older girl seems impossibly mature to Isolde, like Victoria's friends always seem impossibly mature, powdered and scented and full of secrets and private laughter, contemptuous of little Issie for all that she does not yet know." (p.150)

There are many conversations between the saxophone teacher and the mother's of her pupils (always the mothers), who want to know something about their daughters that they think she will know, so we have this lovely observation on the nature of how unfathomable teenager are to their parents:

"The saxophone teacher doesn't speak for a moment, just so Mrs De Gregorio feels uncomfortable and wishes she hadn't spoken so freely. Then she says, 'But how can you ever know?' She is more brooding now and less abrupt. 'How can you ever get to the kernel of truth behind it all? You could watch her. But you have to remember there are two kinds of watching: either she will know she is being watched, or she will not. If she knows she is being watched, her behaviour will change under observation until what you are seeing is so utterly transformed it becomes a thing intended only for observation, and all realities are lost. And if she doesn't know she is being watched, what you are seeing is something unprimed, something unfit for performance, something crude and unrefined that you will try and refine yourself: you will try and give it a meaning that it does not inherently possess, and in doing this you will press your daughter into some mould that misunderstands her. So, you see, neither picture is what you might call true. They are distortions.' " (p.153-4)

It is also about the closed world of adolescence, and the power relationships between groups, and the way they all pass judgement on each other's lives and recognise the inequalities between them. I liked this one:

"The repeated validations become their mantra, and soon the richer girls come to believe the things they are compelled by shame to say. They come to believe that their needs are simply keener, more specialised, more urgent than the needs of the girls who queue outside the chippy and tuck the greasy package down their shirt for the walk home. They do not regard themselves as privileged and fortunate. They regard themselves as people whose needs are aptly and deservedly met, and if you were to call them wealthy they would raise their eyebrows and blink, and say, 'Well, it's not like we're starving or anything, but we're definitely not rich.' " (p.233)

Then towards the end the saxophone teacher sums it all up quite neatly for us, after all the trauma and stress and anxiety that the girls and their parents and their teachers go through over the affair and the random death of another girl:

"The saxophone teacher suddenly feels weary. She sits down. 'Mrs Bly,' she says, 'remember that these years of your daughter's life are only the rehearsal for everything that comes after. Remember that it's in her best interests for everything to go wrong. It's in her best interests to slip up now, while she's still safe in the Green Room with the shrouded furniture and the rows of faceless polystyrene heads and the cracked and dusty mirrors and the old newspapers scudding across the floor. Don't wait until she's out in the savage white light of the floods, where everyone can see. Let her practice everything in a safe environment, with a helmet and kneepads and packed lunches, and you at the end of the hall with the door cracked open a dark half-inch in case anyone cries out in the long hours of the night.' " (p.244)

But the last word falls to Julia, who, in an excellent performance, breaks down all the barriers and calls the adults on their small minded hypocrisy. This, I find, has something very theatrical about it, it has the ring of the final speech of Romeo and Juliet where we are warned to learn the lessons of the story; take heed:

" 'We learned that everything in the world divides in two: good and evil, male and female, truth and falsehood, child and adult, pleasure and pain. We learned that the counsellor possessed a map, a map that would make everything make sense. A key. Like in a theatre programme where you have the actors' names on one side and the list of characters on the other - some neat division that divides the illusive from the real. We learned that there is a distinction - between the performance and the performer, the reality and the lie. We learned there is no middle ground.'
Julia surveys her audience.
'Only those who watch,' she says, 'and those who suffer being watched.'
The others don't dare to rustle.
'But the counsellor lied,' Julia says. 'You lied. You lied about the pain of it, the unsimple mess of it, immeasurably more thorny and wrecked and raw than you could ever remember, with the gauze veil of every year that passes settling over your eyes, thicker and thicker until even your own childhood dissolves into the mist.' " (p.309-10)

How I live now

Creature and I spent last Sunday re-reading 'How I Live Now' by Meg Rosoff in advance of going to see the film. This book has to be young adult fiction at its best, essentially because it removes adults from the equation and puts the characters in a situation where they are forced to make real decisions and face real consequences. Daisy is sent away by her father to stay with cousins in England, mainly so he can build a new life with his new wife and baby. Teenage resentment and rejection abounds, but she seems to settle in to the rural idyll quite quickly. We particularly liked the opening to chapter 6:

"I hardly saw Osbert that week because he went to school, unlike Isaac and Edmond and Piper, who were supposed to be Home Schooled, which as far as I could tell meant reading whatever books you happened to be interested in, and every once in a blue moon having Aunt Penn say Have you learned any geography? and them saying yes." (p.22)

and the whole of the first section before the war starts felt rather like an EO gathering, even the house seemed like some of the Youth Hostels we used to stay in, so the whole thing was a bit of a nostalgia trip really. Almost from nowhere Daisy and Edmond develop this overwhelming passionate love affair that is just as rapidly ripped apart by the arrival of enemy forces. Their relationship becomes somewhat symbolic of the weird situation they find themselves in, and Daisy sums it up quite well:

"The real truth is that the war didn't have much to do with it except that it provided a perfect limbo in which two people who were too young and too related could start kissing without any thing or anyone making us stop. There were no parents, no teachers, no schedules. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do that would remind us that this sort of thing didn't happen in the Real World. There no longer was any Real World." (p.45)

The whole war thing is very vague and sits in the background of the story, really it is just a means to create a surreal and dangerous situation that the characters are forced to navigate. We then follow Daisy and Piper and how they survive after their forced relocation and subsequent struggle to return home. The story becomes about the relationship between the two girls, one that forces Daisy out of her well of self-pity and gives her a reason to keep going. It contrasts interestingly with something like 'Hunger Games'; where Katniss was always strong, a fighter and a surviver, here we have Daisy who is a bit of a wet blanket and what Meg Rosoff gives us is her transformation into someone who is a fighter and a surviver. I did feel a little as if there was not enough real threat and danger in their return journey together, it was a bit too much of an afternoon walk through the english countryside, but what I do like is the fact that she doesn't tie the story up nice and neatly with a clichéd reunion scene. Not giving us all the information allows the reader to imagine what happened to Daisy in between. We are left a little in limbo, but then life is often like that. The story certainly has a lot of film potential, although it seems they have avoided the more challenging aspects of the Daisy/Edmond relationship. I am just hoping they have tackled the rest of the story accurately or Creature will be whispering annoyingly in my ear for the whole film.

Eleanor and Park

Lovely, lovely and more lovely. I sat before work today, dawdling over my breakfast, and finished 'Eleanor and Park' by Rainbow Rowell. This is another book that I read about on someone's blog and added to my library request list. It was partly for Creature because the two characters bond over a shared enjoyment of comic books, but once I had read the first couple of chapters I was so taken with it. 

Eleanor appears on the school bus and in a moment of pity Park moves over and gives her a seat; so begins a beautiful friendship, that blossoms into something neither expected. Park is an oddball 'Asian kid' who lives life keeping his head down in the hope that no one will notice him, just on the periphery of the 'back of the bus' gang. Eleanor, with her wild red curls and a somewhat eccentric dress sense, has just been accepted back into the bosom of her family. Her mother is trapped in a horrible abusive relationship with a man who seems to delight in exercising his power over the family, and who had unceremoniously kicked Eleanor out over a year previously. The uneasy peace in the family home is punctuated by drunken screaming rows, tantrums and gunshots. I tried very hard not to judge the mother, having read a long article just recently about how abusive people control and manipulate others, but I did spend a lot of the book angry with her for failing to protect her children. 

Although the story is peppered with friends and family members the focus is on Eleanor and Park, with sections swapping back and forth between their two perspectives on the developing relationship. It is lovely because it is such a wonderful portrayal of teenage insecurities and the knots that people tie themselves in when they like someone but don't want to be vulnerable to the pain of rejection. He begins by lending her comic books when he catches her reading over his shoulder:

"They still didn't talk on the bus, but it had become a less confrontational silence. Almost friendly (but not quite).
Park would have to talk to her today - to tell her that he didn't have anything to give her. He'd overslept, than forgotten to grab the stack of comics he'd set out for her the night before. He hadn't even had time to eat breakfast or brush his teeth, which made him self-conscious, knowing he was going to be sitting so close to her.
But when she got on the bus and handed him yesterday's comics, all Park did was shrug. She looked away. They both looked down.
She was wearing that ugly necktie again. Today it was tied around her wrist. Her arms and wrists were scattered with freckles, layers of them in different shades of gold and pink, even on the back of her hands. Little-boy hands, his mom would call them, with short-short nails and ragged cuticles.
She stared down at the books in her lap. Maybe she thought he was mad at her. He stared at her books, too - covered in ink and Art Nouveau doodles." (p.43)

Then it starts to get very intense and sensual, like when you are attracted to someone you are hyper-aware of them and their physical presence. It is lovely because you can't help but sympathise with them and their predicament. You want to reassure them but the story has presented us with such a vivid picture of both that you understand the tiny baby steps they take towards each other:

"Holding Eleanor's hand was like holding a butterfly. Or a heartbeat. Like holding something complete and completely alive.
As soon as he had touched her, he wondered how he'd gone this long without doing it. He rubbed his thumb through her palm and up her fingers, and was aware of her every breath.
Park had held hands with girls before. Girls at Skateland. A girl at the ninth grade dance last year. (They'd kissed while they waited for her dad to pick them up.) He'd even held Tina's hand, back when they 'went' together in the sixth grade.
And always, before, it had been fine. not much different from holding Josh's hand when they were little kids crossing the street. Or holding his grandma's hand when she took him to church. Maybe a little sweatier, a little more awkward.
...
Or maybe, he thought now, he just didn't recognise all those other girls. The way a computer drive will spit out a disk if it doesn't recognise the formatting.
When he touched Eleanor's hand, he recognised her. He knew." (p.72-3)

And little touches like this, that lets you know that here is a writer who really understand her characters:

"She saw him after seventh hour in a place she'd never seen him before, carrying a microscope down the hall on the third floor. It was at least twice as nice as seeing him somewhere she expected him to be." (p.163-4)

There is an early reference in their English class to 'Romeo and Juliet'. Eleanor is scathing of the idea that they fall in love, but the scene feels like it's being set; we have our two protagonists, from very much opposite sides of the fence, a social gulf rather than a family feud (and he even arrives at her bedroom window at one point). Even though she has to lie to her mother, Park's house becomes a safe space for Eleanor to escape her increasingly unpleasant home life, but you can't help but know that their carefully constructed deception is going to come crashing down around them. She gives us crises, she gives us moments of bliss, she gives us unlikely characters stepping into the breach, she gives us a dramatic rescue ... this book just has it all. Perfect comfort reading for the middle aged and cynical. I loved it.