The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han

The Summer I Turned Pretty (2009) by Jenny Han is a coming-of-age story about Isabel “Belly” Conklin. Belly is 15 years old. Every summer, Belly, her brother Steven, and their mother Laurel go to Cousins Beach where they stay with Laurel’s best friend Susannah and her two sons, Conrad and Jeremiah.

Belly has had a crush on Conrad for years, but he treats her like his kid sister. The three boys often do things together, and over the years, they have left Belly out. This year, Belly has grown up, and she thinks things will be different.

It is a different summer for Belly. The boys look at her in a new way. And Belly begins dating her first boyfriend Cameron.

The book chapters flit back and forth in time as Belly remembers events from past summers. The back and forth can be a bit confusing to read at times, and it was a bit sloppy. I think the author may have been confused by the timeline too. For instance, in Chapter 34, Belly talks about getting her period at age 13 at Putt Putt, but on the next page she wants to reclaim Putt Putt for her “twelve-year-old self.”

Nitpicking aside, the story is a fun, breezy read about adolescence and young love.

Related Reviews:
It's Not Summer Without You by Jenny Han
We'll Always Have Summer by Jenny Han

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The End of Me by Alfred Hayes

The End of Me (1968) is a novel by Alfred Hayes about a fifty-one-year-old man named Asher whose life has fallen apart. At the beginning of the novel, Asher witnesses his wife having an affair with a fellow tennis player. Asher is shattered and feels like howling. He returns to his house and decides to leave every light on and blazing instead of burning the house down. Then he leaves L.A. without telling his wife. Asher escapes to New York City where he was born and spent many years. He thinks,

"Thirty-five years. Yes. I'd given the city so much of my possible life. Surely, what was broken in me, the crippled sense of myself, would be restored. I'd heal among these brutal angles. I'd bathe in her like a spa. I'd convalesce in her indifferent arms."

He takes a room in a hotel with a view of Central Park, and watches the world from his window. Asher reflects on his life. He was once a successful screenwriter, but then as he grew older, Hollywood lost interest in him and doors closed on him. Asher describes it saying, "...the way the jobs disappeared, the people hanging up on the phone, the being turned into a ghost. They do that to you, you know: they ghostify you." He had two failed marriages and has no children. He thinks, "Well: apparently, what one ran out of was not mistakes, but the years to make them in."

When he walks around New York, he sees the changes in the city, reflecting:

"I'd walk slowly, I thought, and I would let the city come at me slowly. But New York does not come at you slowly. It isn't a landscape. It comes at you simultaneously. It is constantly existing at the periphery of your sight. You are almost always seeing at the very edge of what you see something else that you are still not seeing. I had always known this even when it was a different city and I had lived in it and was now trying to live in it again."

Asher visits his Aunt Dora, who mentions that her grandson Michael Bey wants to be a writer too. Asher meets Michael, who is a jaded, suspicious young man. Asher is rude to him, but later regrets his behavior. In his remorse, Asher hires Michael to walk around New York City with him to visit places that were significant in his past. Asher later wonders if he is trying to gain Michael’s approval, as though by sharing his history he will have a protégé.

Michael is dating a law student named Aurora d’Amore. Her name is ridiculously fake sounding, and Aurora is good at playing a wide-eyed innocent routine and "complicated games." Asher is attracted to her, and he jealously wonders what Aurora sees in Michael. When he’s with Aurora, Asher wishes he was still young.

Asher fails to see that Michael and Aurora are conniving and cruel. They gain Asher’s confidence to learn his deepest secrets, and they lie to him and humiliate him in profound ways. Asher is foolish, not realizing that that the pair is working to trick him and amuse themselves. At the novel’s conclusion, he reflects, "Everything went by. Nothing went by. I went by." Instead of finding a place to heal, Asher found more cruelty in New York. The End of Me is a tragic and cold story of loss, aging, generational conflict, ignorance, despair, and humiliation.

Related Reviews:
My Face for the World to See by Alfred Hayes
In Love by Alfred Hayes

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The Bees

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Fall Trees

Heavily filtered photo of autumn trees.

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Heat Dome

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And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges by Amber Sparks

And I Do Not Forgive You (2020) is a collection of stories, reflections, lists, and essays by Amber Sparks. It’s a thought-provoking and humorous read. The stories have fantastical, surprising, gruesome, and imaginative twists. Most of the stories feature unique female protagonists. Sparks is a Gen X writer with a strong feminist perspective, who describes herself as a "morbid weirdo" in her acknowledgments. I discovered her writing on Twitter where I often identify with her tweets, and I decided to read one of her books.

The collection contains the following 22 stories:

Mildly Unhappy, with Moments of Joy
You Won't Believe What Really Happened to the Sabine Women
A Place for Hiding Precious Things
Everyone's a Winner in Meadow Park
A Short and Slightly Speculative History of Lavoisier's Wife
We Destroy the Moon
In Which Athena Designs a Video Game with the Express Purpose of Trolling Her Father
Is the Future a Nice Place for Girls
Our Mutual (Theater) Friend
The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines
The Eyes of Saint Lucy
We Were a Storybook Back Then
Rabbit by Rabbit
Through the Looking-Glass
The Noises from the Neighbors Upstairs
Our Geographic History
Death Deserves All Caps
A Wholly New and Novel Act, with Monsters
When the Husband Grew Wings
The Language of the Stars
Mildly Joyful, with Moments of Extraordinary Unhappiness
Tour of the Cities We Have Lost

Some pieces of writing are quite lengthy, but most are short and succinct. My favorite stories included "Mildly Unhappy, with Moments of Joy," a painful recounting of a broken friendship where one party is ghosted by text message, and "A Place for Hiding Precious Things," which was a modern fairy tale about a princess whose fairy godmother helps her escape her lecherous father. I also enjoyed "A Short and Slightly Speculative History of Lavoisier's Wife" where Sparks recounts the contributions of Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier who has been minimized in history as her husband’s "helpmeet."

And I Do Not Forgive You is a great read, especially if you’re a Gen X, feminist, morbid weirdo, who loves history, ghost stories, and fairy tales.

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