The Realm of Possibility by David Levithan
Title: The Realm of Possibility by David Levithan
Pages: 224
Rating: 2/5
Genre: YA Lit
Summary (Off Goodreads): Enter The Realm of Possibility and meet a boy whose girlfriend is in love with Holden Caulfield; a girl who loves the boy who wears all black; a boy with the perfect body; and a girl who writes love songs for a girl she can’t have.
These are just a few of the captivating characters readers will get to know in this intensely heartfelt new novel about those ever-changing moments of love and heartbreak that go hand-in-hand with high school. David Levithan plumbs the depths of teenage emotion to create an amazing array of voices that readers won’t forget. So, enter their lives and prepare to welcome the realm of possibility open to us all. Love, joy, and these stories will linger.
Review: I love David Levithan. I will be the first to admit that I think he is an amazing author and I really love his books and how he's not afraid to push the envelope with his books. The Realm of Possibility had a lot of potential but there were so many things that just made it frustrating rather than enjoyable.
One of the first things that put me off to this book was the formatting. It's all formatted in short lines, like poetry, except none of it is (though, there is ONE entry that's song lyrics.) My brain automatically stops the sentence at the end of the line but that's not where most of the sentences end. They wrap, which kind of drives me crazy. The formatting detracts from the story he's trying to tell, the messages he makes an effort to convey. It's actually unfortunate, because some of the things he puts in there are amazing.
The other major thing that bothered me is how hard it was to keep track of everyone. It's compiled of numerous short stories from students at a high school. It has very Crash-like qualities, in the sense that everyone is supposed to connect somehow. Sometimes it's easy to see those connections (one girl hits another girl with a tray. The next story is the story of the girl who got hit.) Other times, they'll reference someone from the beginning of the book at the end and I have to go back and remind myself who was who. He also labels the beginning of the sections with the names of everyone who is in that section instead of labeling each story. It actually makes it more frustrating because, within each section, I would forget who was supposed to be speaking and have to go back to see. It just disrupted the story and flow.
There were good parts to the book. Crappy formatting doesn't make Levithan a bad writer. There were still MANY, truly poetic moments. Sometimes the lines would just hit you and you wouldn't even believe that he had just managed to write something so powerful. One of my favorite lines was, "Once time is lit it will burn, whether or not you're breathing it in. Even after smoke becomes air, there is the memory of smoke."
When I saw HOW some of the characters connect, I like that they did. I like how they interacted and how sometimes you got different views of the same story. Levithan does an amazing job at showing us how the world turns through these young characters, characters who are still largely trying to figure out who they are.
I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys "6 degrees of separation" type stories. People who enjoy poetry may also like it (even though it's not poetry), mainly because the formatting would probably bother them less. It was a good idea, even well written, just poorly executed.
Books so far this year: 14/75
Currently Reading: Mirror, Mirror by Gregory Maguire and The Secret Hour (Midnighters #1) by Scott Westerfeld
You can read this review and all other atim_writing or my Goodreads account.
X-posted to bookish & bookfails