ARC Review: I Crawl Through It - A.S. King

I Crawl Through It 
A. S. King
Series: N/A
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Surreal
Release Date: September 22nd, 2015
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

This was the most unexpected book I have ever read.

Never having encountered a piece of fiction quite like this -- a YA novel surreal to the core, but still grounded in reality -- it took a few pages for me to get with the program and understand the way it was written. When Stanzi mentions the invisible red helicopter her friend Gustav is building that she can only see on Tuesdays, this does not mean he does not allow her to see it any other day or that it's merely a joke between them. It means he is truly building a helicopter that is invisible to most, and to Stanzi, it is visible on Tuesdays. When China Knowles says she has swallowed herself, turned herself inside out, this is not simply a metaphor for shrinking into herself after a traumatic event. She is genuinely seen as organs on legs by the characters in the book.

The best way to read this book is to take everything literally. In any other book, mentioning a character where her hair was so long you swear it grew a foot since the day before would be taken as exaggeration. Of course it didn't, but it seemed that way because it's just that long and the reader can piece this together. In I Crawl Through It, everything is so surreal, that nothing is exaggeration. Landsdale Cruise's hair grows a foot with each pathological lie she tells, and there is a dangerous man in a bush who gives out chains of letters that are infinitely long and there is an invisible island you can fly to in the invisible helicopter to escape the school where there are daily bomb threats and drills and practice tests.

And it all works so remarkably well. I finished the book not only mulling over what I just read but wondering why I'd never read anything by A.S. King before, resolving to put her at the top of my list of authors to be read soon.

Not only was the story so interestingly woven but it was well written and also had some important points about how we all cope with trauma/stress/bad-things-of-a-serious-nature in different ways. Whether that involves lying and baking or dissecting all the animals in the school or building something no one can see or writing poems about how inanimate objects have more self-esteem than you, this book showed teens compartmentalizing and avoiding their trauma and it also showed them dealing with it in important ways like standing up to an abuser, and it was cool that it wasn't just a weird book with inside out girls. Not that I wouldn't have read that book to be honest.

I briefly mentioned that it was well-written and I want to touch upon that as well. I absolutely loved A.S. King's voice in this novel. Every line seemed so purposeful, so powerful, and so many of them were so beautifully phrased. A lot of the book had an air of gloom and that was cool too because you could feel it coming from the character's words, not the author's, and it reinforced the fact that they were sad and stuck and looking for something.

When I picked up I Crawl Through It, I was expecting a regular realistic fiction YA book about sad, stressed kids in high school. I wasn't expecting anything bad, because regular realistic fiction YA books about sad stressed kids in high school are often books I like, but this was not like anything I've read before and I hope you read it too.

- Noor

Would you rather be inside out or hairnocchio? 
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Stuffed Animal Saturday: Financial Accounting 9th Edition, Jerry J. Weygandt, Donald E. Kieso, Paul D. Kimmel

Stuffed Animal Saturday is a meme that we post here at We Live and Breathe Books to showcase the book we're currently reading with one of our favorite stuffed animals and discuss our stuffed animal's opinion (well, it's really our opinion, but that's besides the point). We hope you enjoy our quirky feature as much as we enjoy writing it!

This Saturday, me and Hydrant are reading Financial Accounting, 9th Edition, by Weygandt, Kieso, and Kimmel. While this is not our typical genre of book, we decided to try it out.

So far: We're on chapter two, but its looking like we're going to be spending the whole semester reading the book. What we know from our reading so far: accounting is very very important and everyone uses it, or at least the finished numbers of it, in business. Which is what makes the world go round, so we're learning very important stuff. Seems really educational for a Young Adult blog, but hey, we're open to reading anything here at We Live and Breathe Books. I'm also reading some lovely pieces on coding java, power politics in the Soviet Union, and more!

Sneak peek: The following is an excerpt from the opening section ("What is Accounting?") of "Chapter 1: Accounting in Action."

What consistently ranks as one of the top career opportunities in business? What frequently rates among the most popular majors on campus? What was the undergraduate degree chosen by Nike founder Phil Knight, Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank, former acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Thomas Pickard, and numerous members of Congress? Accounting.1 Why did these people choose accounting? They wanted to understand what was happening financially to their organizations. Accounting is the financial information system that provides these insights. In short, to understand your organization, you have to know the numbers.

Accounting consists of three basic activities—it identifies, records, and communicates the economic events of an organization to interested users. Let's take a closer look at these three activities.

In all seriousness, I've been insanely busy the last few weeks and I've read at most the few pages of an actual YA book (I know, what a sad life I live). But when things settle down, I'll be able to get my act together and start reading more YA, but for now, me and Hydrant are still reading my Financial Accounting book.

- Amrutha

Are you and your stuffed animal reading anything interesting? 

Let us know in your own Stuffed Animal Saturday!

Double ARC Review: Dumplin' - Julie Murphy

Dumplin'
Julie Murphy
Series: N/A
Genre: Young Adult, Romance, Contemporary
Release Date:September 15th, 2015
Publisher: Balzer + Bray
Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

Willowdean Dickson might have introduced herself to her coworker as "resident fat girl" (she also threw in cashier and Dolly Parton enthusiast) but one of the beauties of her character lies in the way she is not just pigeonholed into one type of fat representative -- she is not the timid, hates-her-body all the time girl who shrouds herself like some kind of villain but she is not the has-no-cares girl either who will remind you just how perfect her size makes her. She is a real character, not a trope.

Willowdean isn't the only character with any kind of "flaw" here. In fact, one of the main focuses of the novel is that Will competes is a local beauty pageant -- a pretty big, important local pageant which her mom is in charge of running and has been since I believe 1997 (or at least that was the year she won) -- and Will's decision to compete, as a not-typical looking competitor, prompts three other not-so-typical looking girls from her high school to emerge from the woodwork and compete, and they form this sort of band of misfits with Willowdean. One of these girls, Millie, is overweight to a much greater degree than Willowdean -- specifically "Millie is that girl, the one I am ashamed to admit that I've spent my whole life looking at and thinking, Thing could be worse. I'm fat, but Millie's the type of fat that requires elastic waist pants because they don't make pants with buttons and zippers in her size."

I thought this was a really important thought to showcase because even though Willowdean herself is one of the ostracized, she still has her own prejudices and throughout the book unlearns them. When she uses Millie to think that things could be worse, it's like assuming things are bad as they are, for either of them, even though Millie is the happiest, most optimistic character in the book. She also has the most confidence too. She sings a song on a ukulele to ask a boy to be her date for their schools Sadie Hawkins dance and when Willowdean hears her immediate reaction is to cringe but Millie's friend relays that he said yes in an "of course" sort of tone, because why should her appearance take precedence over the grandness of the gesture? Likewise, another girl in the group, Amanda, has uneven legs and wears corrective shoes and Will is surprised to learn she's very talented at soccer, and athletic enough to play for a team. Hannah, rounding out the group, has uneven teeth, and has been compared to a horse at school, and Will, in her internal monologue, even says to herself that if she doesn't want to fix them she shouldn't have to, but still eventually asks why she never did, out of curiosity.

None of these questions or reactions make her a bad person, just someone learning that people are more than meets the eye. In fact, I think this book does a wonderful job with body positivity. There's the fact that Murphy doesn't use the overweight characters as the comic relief or the inspirational speeches or the butt of the jokes or any of the tired tropes we've seen again and again. They're just friends girlfriends and characters and yes, their weight does affect their lives like when Will is so terrified to move forward with Private School Bo because the thought of him touching her fat terrifies her or when she has issues with her formal dress for the pageant but those are just realistic problems thrown in based on who the characters are and Will is fat so of course it's gonna have a little impact on her life. Like someone telling her that doing a pageant is "brave," to which she thinks

"But I don't want it to be brave. I want it to be normal."

Which is probably my favorite line in the book, honestly.

I felt like the characters were so realistic and the writing was genuine and the combination of the two things just made the book great. Murphy managed to create a great cast of characters; I'm so far down in the review and I haven't even mentioned Mitch or El, and I only barely mentioned Bo. The romance in this story was so well constructed and I didn't feel like I was reading a typical love triangle of "will she pick this boy or this boy" but a real life story of friendship and more than friendship and lines and love. I liked the personalities of both of them and they are honestly sweet people and that's all I'll say on the boys. As for El, the friendship relationship was one of my favorite aspects of the story because I was wondering, like Willowdean, whether they truly were growing apart as people and were destined not to be friends. It was a truly emotionally wrecking experience and I may or may not have shed many tears at the end of this book. I just felt like it was so relatable -- the jealousy of sharing your friend, the hurt when their friend who you hate gets information about their life before you do, the sense of encroachment when something was supposed to just be yours and now its theirs too but they'll do it better. Some of Willowdean's emotional outbursts felt so juvenile but they felt so unexplainably real. 

As for the writing, Julie Murphy truly captured the spirit of a small Texas town and put it into this book. It's a light read, you could 100% just sit and read it all at once, and you would probably want to. It's cute, it's fluffy, there's some deadpan humor, and one of the characters calls a boy Peachbutt consistently, so get yourselves a copy ASAP.

(Also, I find it fitting that last night was the Miss America pageant and 500% of me definitely watched it and 900% of me was definitely rooting for Miss Alabama because her nickname was Egg McMuffin and I deeply resonate with that)

- Noor

Marlon's Dumplin' Review

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Dumplin' is awesome. It's sweet, hilarious, provocative, and so well balanced.

The absolute best thing about the novel is its message, carried mainly by its protagonist, Willowdean. If for some reason you don't know what this book is about, it's a body positivity-book. Willowdean regards herself as a fat girl, and has the will and confidence to own that image in a society that actively tries to shame it, and through her the novel tries to lay out the nuanced world of body-positivity. 

What drove the novel, for me, was the characters. They felt, for the most part, honest. Willowdean, for example, is not pressed into the role of preacher for body-positivity, nor is she its perfect mascot. While she exudes confidence in herself and is often the one to help her friends (like, giving them advice about having sex) she has grown up with harsh beauty standards and can be problematic herself: she spends a lot of the book being thankful that she's at least not as fat as one of her peers, Millie. Really, none of the characters (except for maybe Mitch and to an extent Bo) are pressed into roles that lack nuance. Ellen, for example, is Will's best friend but she hardly fulfills the best girlfriend cliche, and they have a complex, realistic friendship like normal, real human females. Honestly, I felt their relationship was more important than ones with Bo and Mitch, but those, I guess, were necessary for the novel to show that any girl can fulfill the YA love triangle between hot muscular athletic guy and hot loner guy. And while those other relationships did feel real, they were stretched and made into such a huge part of the book that it was hard for me to get a good feeling for the other subplots, and contributed to an overall pacing issue. In the end, it just made me frustrated with Will and the boys, even though the main romance is built with an honest friendship and feels great.

As for the writing, this novel is hilarious. Will, when she turns up the sass, is probably one of my favorite protagonists to be in the head of. It's brilliant, because there are no moments when people's bodies are used for comedic effect, which, in a piece about bodies, would have been pretty simple for a less considerate author. The descriptions are good, the narrative voice is good, the dialogue is some of the best I've read all year . . . the writing is just very spot on. The plot is fluid and complex, focusing on dead aunts, boys, pageants, dying friendships, and so forth, and it is consistent.

The fault, for me, with the book is the nigh unholy pacing. The central action promised in the blurb happens in the second half of the book. While the book certainly can be read quickly, as the scenes transition fluidly and are generally concise, there is just so much before the pageant that it becomes confusing, and there are no real milestones because the novel deals with several subplots at once. Then the pageant happens quickly. The pacing felt rather awkward this way.

That said, I still highly recommend Dumplin'! 

- Marlon

What do you love most about yourself?

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Review: Tonight the Streets Are Ours - Leila Sales

Tonight the Streets Are Ours
Leila Sales
Series: N/A
Genre: Young Adult, Romance, Contemporary
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

Tonight the Streets Are Ours is actually a really great book, while I had some personal issues with it.

The book begins with Arden Huntley, who is 17 and "recklessly loyal," -- let me just say right now that the beginning of the book and character introductions and the voice of the narrator, everything in the beginning was flawless. I don't want to give away a-not-so-important plot point that happens in the beginning just because I really loved the way it was written and I can't do it justice.

Anyways, so Arden is loyal. Arden has a best friend, Lindsey. You can probably guess what happens next: Arden swoops in to save Lindsey, "drowning herself in the process." The backlash from this is that Arden realizes how she is the one to care the most or do the most in her relationships, and faces a lil existential crisis because of it.

She does some random googling which leads her to a blog, "Tonight the Streets Are Ours," run by this kid Peter who lives in New York City. She becomes obsessed with this kid's personal blog, going all the way back to the beginning and reading all the posts.

Alright, then the plot gets a little messy and the characters all get really annoying, in which they make bad decisions and I hate them all (these are the so called "personal issues of mine"). But to be fair to Sales, this book's character representation was honestly super accurate of reality. I know people in real life that are this crazy and obnoxious and would make the decisions that happened in this plot.

The best thing I can say about the messy nature of this plot is it actually seems like the characters were driving the choices. It felt like Sales built some really complex characters and let them make their own choices, the choices that felt right for them, rather than constructing a realm in which it feels like the choices are made for them. It made me feel as though I was actually experiencing the story, rather than watching it happen.

Also, the character development in this piece is solid. There is very little I can say here other than I loved the classification of this book as a love story, and that I don't want to give anything else away, so please read the book!

- Amrutha

What is your most defining characteristic?
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Review: Everything, Everything - Nicole Yoon

Everything, Everything
Nicola Yoon
Series: N/A
Genre: Young Adult, Romance, Contemporary
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

Number of times Everything, Everything mentioned The Little Prince: eight

Number of times Everything, Everything made me cry: four

Number of times Everything, Everything mentioned the state fish of Hawaii (Humuhumunukunukuapua`a): I forgot to count but probably between three and five

I realize the first and third points aren't really relevant to someone who isn't me (and that third one isn't a High School Musical reference before you go there) but the point is that this even though this a book about a girl who spent eighteen years in the confines of her house, you still find ways to relate with her through the voice Nicola Yoon gives her. For me, it was her favorite book being mine as well and a memory of an old interactive map that my brother and I broke by pressing the Hawaii button over and over. For someone else, it might be the fact that she hates math or loves outer space or only owns white t-shirts and Keds or is half Japanese and half African American. (I think this is the point I was trying to make, I was also mostly just excited about all the references to The Little Prince y'all don't know how much I love that book I even have a pop-up edition of it shoutout to my best friend Anika for that)

Moving on, I absolutely loved loved loved the structure of this book. Before we get into that, I'll just give a little background on the book: Madeleine is living with SCID, a rare disease that affects her immune system so severely that she needs a constantly sterile environment, hence the whole never having left her house thing. She's been pretty well-adjusted with it, but when a boy her age moves in next door and they become friends through email and instant messaging, that tiny bit of change serves as a catalyst for a lot more change.

So, back to structure. Interspersed among the pages of "normal" writing -- you know, the whole "paragraph format, first person narration, dialogue in quotes and separate indented paragraphs" thing -- were breaks in the traditional format for more "fun" things that added to the story -- conversations that happened on an instant messenger, pages from Madeleine's notebooks showing things like a "pre-kiss checklist," a map of despair, a guide to Hawaiian reef fish. Even some of the pages of the book that were traditionally formatted were told in a way that added breaks in the reading because an entire "chapter" would just be one line, or one short conversation, or one paragraph. Sometimes, they were short, one line, spoiler reviews of books, which she had an entire blog dedicated to, and we caught glimpses of. I just want to share two of my favorite ones because they were also two lines I really liked in the book (especially because one of them is that line that has the title that makes you go hey look its the title but also it's my favorite book so double props):

"LIFE IS SHORT: SPOILER REVIEWS BY MADELEINE
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Spoiler alert: You don't exist if no one can see you." 

"LIFE IS SHORT: SPOILER REVIEWS BY MADELEINE
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Spoiler alert: Love is worth everything. Everything." 

I feel like this book was just full of heartbreaking or gut-wrenching one-liners (and not the comedic kind). I mean, the writing throughout the book was beautiful as well, and for a first book, I think Nicola Yoon did a fantastic job, but what really got me were certain lines that just jumped off the pages. I thought about integrating them into this review somehow but I'm just going to go ahead and show you some that I liked a lot (by the way, the copy I have is an ARC I got at BEA, so these quotes may have been subject to change in the finished product):

"Her pain is endless. It falls off the ends of the world. Her pain is a dead sea. Her pain is for me, but I cannot bear it anymore." 

"My guilt is an ocean for me to drown in." 

"Olly's math says you can't predict the future. It turns out you can't predict the past either." 

Speaking of Olly (well I didn't speak of him, but that last quote did) I haven't even mentioned anything about how much I love the story itself. Because I do. Seriously. This was honestly one of the best books I've read in a really long time and it stayed with me for so long after I put it down. The book had like four main characters and even then, two of them were kinda subtly main but they were so intriguing. I was afraid Madeleine and Olly were going to be instalove because the back cover is kindof misleading and it takes two paragraphs that happen in different places in the book and make it look like one passage, but I loved them. I loved Carla, Madeleine's full-time nurse, and out of the four times I cried, I'm pretty sure two were for her, so there's that. And Madeleine's mother just put me through a whole slew of emotions and I always just felt bad for her but honestly she was very well written.

I honestly devoured this book and I was so invested in seeing where Madeleine's life was going to go. I know the ending will probably have a 50/50 response but I enjoyed it. There were consequences to face while exploring the ways trauma can affect a person and nothing was played off as the character in question having ill intentions or being malicious -- which would have resulted in too cartoonish of a villain figure -- but rather being in need of help and facing a mental illness. (Sorry for how inarticulate that was, I was trying to be vague but still give you the gist of it.)

Overall, it was a really sweet, emotional book and Nicola Yoon expertly managed to capture the voice of a teenager who wants more than her lot in life.

- Noor

Can you give us a one sentence spoiler review?
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