Jason Reynolds’ Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks is, in its simplest form, a story about a walk home from school. But it is also a story about grief, growing up, facing your fears, chronic illness, divorce, bullying, and a school bus falling from the sky. The walk home is ten blocks, and each block is told from the perspective of a different kid on their walk home. Students at Latimer have a lot on their plate, with pressure at school and at home to be a certain way. The only time they can truly be themselves is on their walk home, and part of this is trying to figure out their relationship to their community. Although the premise sounds like it might set you up for quite a boring book, Look Both Ways is incredible. Every single child featured is completely different, yet they all are connected in one way or another. Each story revolves around connection and how it affects the children. Sometimes it is the connection between a child and their parents, sometimes it is a connection between peers who have endured similar hardships, sometimes it is good, and sometimes it is painful, but it is an integral part of each story, because the life of a middle schooler is all about connection. Middle school is a time of change, a machine whose input is drastically different from its output. It is one of the places that is guaranteed to produce a person that is wiser than they were when they first walked through those double doors. And this is because middle school students thrive on attachments. It is what influences their every action. All the things they do, all the things they say, it is all because of connection. Reynolds explores this point of view of adolescence by making readers of Look Both Ways realize why certain kids need to be funny, or be a bully, or steal, and why teens are the way that they are. Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks by Jason Reynolds. Atheneum Books, 2020. Buy the book here and help support Stone Soup in the process!
Mexican Gothic Reviewed by Sita, 13
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s gothic horror novel Mexican Gothic is incredible. It has truly mastered the art of its trade, undertaking the ‘something-is-a-little-off’ family living in a something-is-quite-a bit-off house’ story without being cliché, melodramatic, or making the characters unsympathetic or unrealistic. The novel, set in 1950s Mexico, kicks off with its protagonist, 22 year-old Noemí Taboada, at a party with her boyfriend Hugo, when she gets called home by her father. Her father tells her that her cousin, Catalina, who is like a sister to her, had sent a letter to her after months of silence between the two following Catalina’s suspiciously quick marriage to Virgil Doyle. In the letter, Catalina says she hears ghosts in the walls and thinks that Virgil is going to poison her. Concerned for Catalina’s health and safety, Noemí ’s father asks Noemí to go to High Place, the manor in El Triunfo where Cataline lives, in the countryside of Mexico. At first Noemí refuses, but when her father promises to allow her to do a masters program in anthropology instead of simply getting married, she agrees. Once Noemí arrives at High Place, she discovers that the house is lit only by candles, that Catalina has tuberculosis, and that Virgil’s father, Howard Doyle, is interested in eugenics and believes in inferior and superior races. As her stay begins to lengthen, she starts having nightmares, sleepwalks for the first time since childhood, begins to notice that the family acts strange around her, and realizes that Catalina is no longer the lively young girl she knew so well just a year ago. The story is quite well-crafted. Noemí is a very interesting, likable, and believable protagonist. She stays in the house for a long time even though it creeps her out because of her love for her sister, her father, and her desire to get a master’s degree. She doesn’t immediately dismiss all the Doyles and her rebellious nature forces her to rock the boat even when it could be dangerous, just out of spite. Noemí, though, isn’t alone in being well-crafted. Each character is understandable, never acts out of character, is lifelike and heir actions are wholly plausible when meant to be, and the plot twists and secrets hidden in the book make sense in relation to the overall arc of the story. It is very hard to construct a haunted house-esque story without resorting to hackneyed tropes, making your characters unreasonable or implausible, or making the grand reveals too out of the blue to be believable or too obvious to be surprising. Yet Moreno-Garcia avoids all these pitfalls while weaving a masterpiece that caused me to tear through the book in mesmerized fear and spellbound horror. In other words, if you like horror, historical fiction, or gothic novels even the tiniest bit, to say that this book would be worth reading would be the universe’s most profound understatement. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Del Rey Books, 2021. Buy the book here and help support Stone Soup in the process!
Faceless, Reviewed by Sita, 13
Alyssa Sheinmel’s novel Faceless does a remarkable job of portraying the psychological problems involved in the aftermath of a traumatic accident. The protagonist, high school senior Maisie Winters, is out for a run when she nearly dies in an electrical fire. She sustains second-degree burns across her left side, and her face is partially destroyed. To try to help her live a normal life, the doctors perform a face transplant on her. But when Maisie is released from the hospital, she has trouble adjusting to seeing a new face in the mirror. Maisie’s new face, new attitude, and (because of her immunosuppressive drugs), new personality, alienate her friends, boyfriend, parents, and even herself. Despite all of the physical consequences of her accident, it is the emotional and social consequences that Sheinmel focuses on most, which gives the story an interesting angle. Being a teenager, Maisie isn’t as concerned about whether she will be healthy eventually, or be able to function normally. Instead, some of her first concerns are whether or not she will be pretty, or whether she will be able to get a boyfriend, or new friends, whether she’ll be able to run as fast as she did when she was on the track team. She avoids reflective surfaces and despises the immunosuppressive drugs she has to take for making her weak and tired, even though they are saving her life. Faceless shows readers the damage that traumatic accidents can do to one’s psyche—in particular, how bittersweet it feels to be the recipient of a life-changing transplant, and how it feels to lose a part of yourself. Maisie, when in the hospital thinking about whether or not she wants a face transplant, says, “I never thought there was such a thing as a list of names, people waiting for new faces. People waiting for someone else to die.” Once she gets home from the hospital, she has nightmares that make her wake up screaming and crying; but she dreams of her donor’s accident, not her own. She worries about being “a living, breathing ghost,” worries that her donor’s family will see her “walking around with a dead person’s face.” In Faceless, Sheinmel asks how much of yourself can you lose while still being the same person you were before? What makes you you, your body or your soul, and how can the physical alteration of your body complicate these matters? Faceless by Alyssa Sheinmel. Scholastic Press, 2020. Buy the book here and help support Stone Soup in the process!
