AUTHOR: MEG WOLITZER
SERIES: N/A
GENRE: YA, CONTEMPORARY
RELEASE DATE/PUBLISHER: SEPTEMBER 30TH, 2014 BY DUTTON BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
GOODREADS | INDIEBOUND | BOOK DEPOSITORY |
BARNES AND NOBLE | AMAZON
Synopsis:
“If life were fair, Jam Gallahue would still be at home in New Jersey with her sweet British boyfriend, Reeve Maxfield. She’d be watching old comedy sketches with him. She’d be kissing him in the library stacks.
She certainly wouldn’t be at The Wooden Barn, a therapeutic boarding school in rural Vermont, living with a weird roommate, and signed up for an exclusive, mysterious class called Special Topics in English.
But life isn’t fair, and Reeve Maxfield is dead.
Until a journal-writing assignment leads Jam to Belzhar, where the untainted past is restored, and Jam can feel Reeve’s arms around her once again. But there are hidden truths on Jam’s path to reclaim her loss.”
I originally picked up this book at the lovely Powell’s City of Books during a trip down to Portland sometime last year. It’s the kind of book that sat around on my shelves for a long time, always fairly high on my TBR pile, but I take forever to get around to reading.
The story is one that begins with loss, grief, or trauma for not only our main character Jam, but every other “fragile” teenager that goes to the Wooden Barn. Belzhar’s description makes it seem like the perfect fit fir the fall in Seattle, so I picked it up when I came back for school.
I read this one fairly slowly, and was not drawn in the way I am with other stories. The main character Jam was fairly difficult to identify with, because she had completely disconnected from her world after the loss of her boyfriend, Reeve, which is not something I have experienced. She was miserable, and it was not exactly a great perspective to read a book from.
I felt like the other characters in this book had interesting histories, but ultimately the story lacked depth.
Five students at the Wooden Barn are chosen to take a class called Special Topics in English with Mrs. Quenell, where they are given (magical) journals and spend the entire class discussing Sylvia Plath. I feel like Wolitzer missed out on a great opportunity to explore the dynamic in the classroom, because we almost never see interactions between Mrs. Quenell and Jam, Griffin, Casey, Sierra, or Marc.
On a better note, I still felt like each of the characters were interesting, and the plot on a surface level was intriguing. The end of the story caught me by surprise; there is no way I saw the twist that is at the very end. Details of Jam’s story are finally explained in the second to last chapter, and this changed everything I thought I knew about Jam. It kind of made me like the main character less than before, and honestly left me questioning everything I thought I had known about the story.
Belzhar has an intriguing plot, and interesting characters, but lacks depth. While is delivers an incredibly surprising twist at the end, it is a twist that makes me like the book less than before. There are a lot of missed opportunities for character development in this book, causing it to ultimately fall flat. Belzhar had small bursts of insightful paragraphs, but as a whole was not my favorite.
