{Book Review} Speak Easy, Speak Love by McKelle George

Six teenagers’ lives intertwine during one thrilling summer full of romantic misunderstandings and dangerous deals in this sparkling retelling of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.

After she gets kicked out of boarding school, seventeen-year-old Beatrice goes to her uncle’s estate on Long Island. But Hey Nonny Nonny is more than just a rundown old mansion. Beatrice’s cousin, Hero, runs a struggling speakeasy out of the basement—one that might not survive the summer. Along with Prince, a poor young man determined to prove his worth; his brother John, a dark and dangerous agent of the local mob; Benedick, a handsome trust-fund kid trying to become a writer; and Maggie, a beautiful and talented singer; Beatrice and Hero throw all their efforts into planning a massive party to save the speakeasy. Despite all their worries, the summer is beautiful, love is in the air, and Beatrice and Benedick are caught up in a romantic battle of wits that their friends might be quietly orchestrating in the background.

Hilariously clever and utterly charming, McKelle George’s debut novel is full of intrigue and 1920s charm. For fans of Jenny Han, Stephanie Perkins, and Anna Godbersen.*

Much Ado About Nothing meets the Roaring Twenties – my favorite among Shakespeare’s comedies, and my favorite musical era, all in one book? What’s not to love? I fell in love with the spiel, but stayed for the writing, because the execution was phenomenal. I was immersed in the time of the Prohibition despite it not really being a topic of historical interest for me (beyond my love for the music produced at that time, anyway), and what’s more, I enjoyed it. This novel is very character-driven, more so than plot, but personally, I like my books character-driven anyway. Beatrice, Benedick, Hero, Pedro/Prince, Maggie, and John were fleshed out perfectly, and I had a fun time getting to know the characters I loved in the play version getting into the same shenanigans but with more backstory and more heart. The dialogue was delightfully witty, especially the banters and sparring matches between Beatrice and Benedick, enough to do even Will himself proud.

I’m glad I read this during my Christmas break – reading every chapter was like unwrapping a gift from a close friend, a friend who also happened to know exactly what I wanted. It’s definitely one of the best adaptations I’ve read, with a fresh enough take that I’d say I would’ve loved this anyway even without knowing it was an adaptation.

My favorite quotes: 

“There was a sunniness in his words that somehow even disguised his appearance, erasing the boy shaking with exhaustion, flattening all his mercurial layers into one outfit of razzle-dazzle. But the razzle-dazzle was also real. That was the most baffling part of all. He was this, too.

She let him do it, not only because she came out looking all right in his story, not a clock-throwing ruin of a girl, but also because Benedick’s talking about her as if she were already one of them made her one of them.

Words. What a tricky, tangled science.”

“Perish the thought, me in love with this magnificently hideous bluestocking! For surely she was ugly, and yet there was never a question of attraction, because she had such beauty of thought. A luminous intelligence that outshone her perceived flaws. Small-minded criticisms of her visage could not withstand such tenderness, such strange, endless mystery in her eyes, of which most mortals had no conception, that left behind a sense of having encountered something truly exquisite.”

“No one wants to be told all the ways they’re falling short of your lofty standard of humanity. Kindly allow me the relief of not engaging with you”

“He felt like climbing a mountain, not for any heroic reason but for something stupid, like picking her a flower; he felt subservient to her whims, desperate for her not to command anyone but him; he felt terrified for feeling all those things after a tiny kiss, a nothing kiss, a fraction, a weed, a sneeze, compared with a dozen other tokens of affection he’d received in his life.”

“What are you rambling about, you nonsensical contradiction?”

In a nutshell…

Rating: 4.5/5

368 pages

Author: McKelle George

Original Language: English

Published: 2017

Genre: Young Adult, Fiction

{Book Review} Turtles All The Way Down by John Green

Sixteen-year-old Aza never intended to pursue the mystery of fugitive billionaire Russell Pickett, but there’s a hundred-thousand-dollar reward at stake and her Best and Most Fearless Friend, Daisy, is eager to investigate. So together, they navigate the short distance and broad divides that separate them from Russell Pickett’s son, Davis.

Aza is trying. She is trying to be a good daughter, a good friend, a good student, and maybe even a good detective, while also living within the ever-tightening spiral of her own thoughts.

In his long-awaited return, John Green, the acclaimed, award-winning author of Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars, shares Aza’s story with shattering, unflinching clarity in this brilliant novel of love, resilience, and the power of lifelong friendship.*

(Yes, it’s been a while since I posted! Life, especially medical school, has proven itself to be a black hole for most of my time and energy, and I haven’t been able to read for pleasure as much as I would have liked. I still get to read books for fun, but only this one has compelled me to write a review this year so far. That, and it’s ASEAN week for us here in the Philippines, so I have no classes this week! We still have schoolwork to do, but yay, conditional freedom. Anyway, on to the review!)

Let it be known that I had no idea what this book was about when I started reading it, even though I’ve heard about it for a while now. I think that’s probably an amazing feat, actually, granting that I follow a lot of book bloggers in various social media sites, but med school blinders are pretty powerful. I’m glad I read this book, though. I thought I had John Green all figured out, and therefore could brace myself from emotional onslaught, but then Turtles All The Way Down prances into the picture and I end up getting all sorts of unwarranted feelings from a book again. 

I just read the book’s final page around 40 minutes ago, and the time it took reaching to typing this sentence was mostly spent trying to figure out how I really feel about this book. I had such a hard time reading this because of Aza’s obsessive-compulsiveness (she has OCD, even though it was never explicitly mentioned), or what she calls her “invasives”, but I flew by the pages anyway because I wanted to know what would happen to her. I didn’t find Aza likable at the beginning, but accompanying her in her journey to become a better version of herself has made me quite attached to her by the end. I suppose in a way, her psychiatrist Dr. Singh was correct in saying that your thoughts are not you. The book was narrated by Aza, yes, but beyond her warring thoughts, her personality just shines through.

It’s become so typical to read about teenagers who have meaningful conversations about science, philosophy, and life in a John Green novel, but I loved this nevertheless! Some people have mentioned how unrealistic the conversations portrayed teenagers, but I will argue that as a teenager not too long ago, I loved thinking about this sort of thing. I just never had the eloquence nor the courage to express those thoughts out loud. To be quite honest, between the conversations, the main character, and other aspects of the plot, I found the missing billionaire part the most forgettable. It wasn’t as fleshed out as I expected, but eventually, even as its loose ends were tied up, it wasn’t the reason I continued reading until the end.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. The most fascinating part for me was Aza, her relationship with herself, and how she got along with the people around her. It felt really vulnerable and personal, and learning that this is but a foggy reflection of the John Green’s own struggles with OCD made more of an impact for me, because it helped me understand mental illness a bit better. That definitely makes this book important.

My favorite quotes (the whole thing is pretty quotable, really): 

“Whether it hurts is kind of irrelevant.”

“At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.”

“And the thing is, when you lose someone, you realize you’ll eventually lose everyone.”

“One of the challenges with pain—physical or psychic—is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can’t be represented the way a table or a body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language.”

“And we’re such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn’t real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracize and minimize. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage people in such pains exemplify, which is why I’d ask you to frame your mental health around a word other than crazy.”

“Your now is not your forever.”

“Everyone always celebrates the easy attractiveness of green or blue eyes, but there was a depth to Davis’s brown eyes that you just don’t get from lighter colors, and the way he looked at me made me feel like there was something worthwhile in the brown of my eyes, too.”

“It’s a weird phrase in English, in love, like it’s a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don’t get to be in anything else—in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love.”

“Thoughts are only thoughts. They are not you. You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don’t.”

“Every loss is unprecedented. You can’t ever know someone else’s hurt, not really—just like touching someone else’s body isn’t the same as having someone else’s body.”

“Life is a series of choices between wonders.”

“In the best conversations, you don’t even remember what you talked about, only how it felt.”

“…the world is also the stories we tell about it.”

“People always talk like there’s a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn’t, at least not for me. I remember what I’ve imagined and imagine what I remember.”

“I missed everybody. To be alive is to be missing.”

“You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why.”

In a nutshell…

Rating: 4.5/5

286 pages
Author: John Green
Original Language: English
Published: 2017
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Fiction

{Book Review} A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab

Kell is one of the last Travelers—rare magicians who choose a parallel universe to visit.

Grey London is dirty, boring, lacks magic, ruled by mad King George. Red London is where life and magic are revered, and the Maresh Dynasty presides over a flourishing empire. White London is ruled by whoever has murdered their way to the throne. People fight to control magic, and the magic fights back, draining the city to its very bones. Once there was Black London – but no one speaks of that now.

Officially, Kell is the Red Traveler, personal ambassador and adopted Prince of Red London, carrying the monthly correspondences between royals of each London. Unofficially, Kell smuggles for those willing to pay for even a glimpse of a world they’ll never see. This dangerous hobby sets him up for accidental treason. Fleeing into Grey London, Kell runs afoul of Delilah Bard, a cut-purse with lofty aspirations. She robs him, saves him from a dangerous enemy, then forces him to another world for her ‘proper adventure’.

But perilous magic is afoot, and treachery lurks at every turn. To save all of the worlds, Kell and Lila will first need to stay alive — trickier than they hoped. *

I started reading this with just a fair amount of interest, and I wasn’t as invested at the beginning because I found it quite slow, so it was always in the back burner for a while until I finished the other books I was reading at the time, but as I journeyed with Kell and Lila throughout the book, my imagination pretty much exploded trying to imagine all the other Londons, and I had so much fun trying to see everything in my head. I reasoned that I didn’t want to rush it, because I wanted to absorb as much of the worlds as I could, and I figured reading by parts would be the best course of action I could take (yes, I like planning things way too much). That plan turned out pretty well until more than halfway through the book, when I was just, sod it, I’m going to finish the entire thing. Goodbye, schedule for the rest of the day.

The worldbuilding was fantastic. It was like I could imagine what all the Londons looked like, but I still wanted so much to have been there myself, journeying with the characters even though I would have been as much of a liability as a sack of bones. All of the Londons, even White London, were vivid and real to me, and imagining worlds as different as they are but with the same geography made is somehow both easier and more confusing, but that’s okay, because it made me think about the book even while I was doing other things (maybe not such a good thing if you’re busy, but it’s my summer vacation, so it is for me). It came to the point where I wished so much that I am a really good artist so I can put onto paper the Londons as I imagine them to look like.

I also found the characters great. It wasn’t love at first sight for me, because I only started actively rooting for them when the masquerade started and things finally started getting exciting, but I liked them just the same. I wish I got to see Rhy more, because Kell’s really biased and I wanted to form my own opinion of him. The interactions with Lila was a promising start, and perhaps there will be more ways I could get to know him in the sequel, so yay! Also, *spoiler alert* some of the supporting characters die, so best not get too attached. I was so upset about a couple of the deaths, even though I don’t even know them that well, but I guess it just has to be done. This is a war, after all, albeit a really small-scale one that the masses of Grey, Red, and White London know nothing about, but it’s the beginning of one, so I’m sure the dying won’t stop anytime soon.*end of spoiler alert*

This is the kind of book that made me so eager to see what’s next that I was already reading the next page before I realized that I haven’t even finished reading this description paragraph thing a page before, so then I have to read everything again, and then I get ahead of myself. I blame that as the main reason why I couldn’t finish the book sooner, but really, it’s just an excuse to keep reading before it actually ends. I highly recommend this book for anyone who loves fantasy, adventure, and a dash of steampunk. 

Favorite quotes

Purity without balance is its own corruption.

‘I’d rather die on an adventure than live standing still.’

‘Love doesn’t keep us from freezing to death, Kell,’ she continued, ‘or starving, or being knifed for the coins in our pocket. Love doesn’t buy us anything, so be glad for what you have and who you have because you may want for things but you need for nothing.’

Delilah Bard looked like a king. No, she thought, straightening. She looked like a conqueror.

In a nutshell…

Rating: 4.5/5

400 pages
Author: V.E. Schwab
Original Language: English
Published: February 24, 2015
Genre: Fantasy