me and earl and the dying girl. jesse andrews. (277)

i picked up me, and earl, and the dying girl, because there will be a panel about the movie based on it at bookcon.  but unlike the other ya novels that i have read for bookcon, i absolutely adored this one.  and if you are going to watch a movie based on a ya novel this summer, make it this one!  screw paper towns!  team me, and earl, and the dying girl!  i have to add that the movie did really well at sundance and nick offerman is in it!

so the novel.  i feel like i have read something with a similar premise or maybe saw a movie (?), but basically this novel is an admission letter by greg gaines (the me in the title) to explain why his grades went south his senior year of high school.  i love that novel ended with greg saying that he would not turn this book into a novel, but maybe that was jesse andrews way of saying that he wanted it to become a movie.  lol

i don't know what to write, other than you need to read it.  its a ya novel, so it shouldn't take you long.  and its sweet without being sappy.  i also loved the realness of the characters.  earl grew up in a troubled home with gangster brothers.  greg is a bit of a dick.  these kids are not goody two shoes but regular teens.  i also admired how it was very realistic with its dealing of leukemia.  i, for one, appreciated "the moron's guide to leukemia", because you always read about it, but never really know what it is.  also i loved that greg didn't know how to comfort rachel (the dying girl) except to make her laugh, because most of the times we don't know what to do in those situation.  it was nice to see greg struggle with that instead of always saying the right thing.  i know i for one am always lost for the right words though my heart is filled with good intentions.  greg struggling to comfort rachel was refreshing, he's a teenage boy, what does he know about death?

though i will add that i was shocked how abruptly rachel died, but i guess that is how it is.  also her death wasn't stretched out but the again, this was greg's story, not hers.  and like novel warned us, this wasn't like other books that deal with cancer and teens.

and of course, i loved their movies!  i did have to look up most of them online. i have to admit that i have no desire to see aguirre, the warth of god that did not look interesting to me, but to each his own.  this part of the novel reminded me of michel gondry's  be kind rewind.  as i read about their remakes, i had visions of mos def and jack black remaking movies. 

i also loved the different forms of writing that andrews used, ie the stage directions and dialogue, the bullet points in that one chapter.

i really enjoyed this book and wish that it was around in high school.  and out of all the ya novels i read for bookcon, i have to say this may have been the best.

catcher, caught. sarah collins honenberger.

i first saw "catcher, caught" on amazon's daily deal and the houseboat which i thought was a trailer, didn't intrigue me (who wants to read about white trash?) so i didn't read the description of it.  then, it reappeared in the kindle store and i read it was the story of a boy with only a year to live that runs away to new york inspired by "catcher in the rye", hence the title.  due to my love of" catcher in the rye", i was disappointed with myself for not buying it when it was a 1.99 on amazon.  but as luck would have it, when my mom took my brother to the san juan capistrano mission, i opt out of paying to see the mission, and went to the library.  where oddly enough i spent more money on books than my mission admission, and one of the books i purchased for $1 was "catcher, caught".

since i just finished "the catcher in the rye" and was going to new york, i decided to read "catcher, caught" since i would be in the right setting.  of course i didn't have any time to read in nyc and fell asleep on my flight there but that was fine because sadly the running away part was at the end and not the whole story.

i was disappointed because i thought "catcher, caught" would pay homage to "catcher" by being the story of a boy trying to find himself by retracing holden's stops in new york.  i mean that is what the back cover claimed, but it wasn't about that.  the setting for majority of the story is virginia, where the main character, daniel who is dying from leukemia, lives with his family in a houseboat.  daniel does read and analyze "the catcher in the rye" throughout the book but i was less interested because i wanted him to be in new york, trying to be holden.

to be honest, i didn't care for this book. one reason being that daniel did not seem like a 16 year old boy to me, but more like an older woman trying to sound like a 16 year old boy.  i have never been a 16 year old boy nor have i ever been faced with dying in a year but there are still some things i expect a teenager to act like regardless.  there were times where his thoughts were too sensitive for an adolescent male.  and the way he talked about meredith's body was way too mature for a 16 year old boy, don't they just want see tits?  also who has sex for the first time and it be this amazing experience?!?!  daniel was a 16 year old boy from the backwoods of virginia, i mean he would have lasted like 3 minutes if he was lucky.  and they did it twice? i mean they went through two condoms, and i am going to assume that one of them was broken because they didn't know how to put it on versus having sex twice. and yes, daniel was dying but meredith gave it up quite quickly.  i mean don't kids experiment with oral sex before they have actual sex?  also who lets their 16 year old twin daughters stay out til 1 am?  other than parents of teen moms.

another issue i had was daniel's relationship with his kid brother nick.  nick was younger and competitive (this adjective was used every time this character was mentioned, we got the point collins honenberger) and obviously having issues with his brother dying but daniel didn't try to help him cope with it.  he just got annoyed with him wanting pizza all the time.  daniel was having deep 40 year old woman thoughts about life but couldn't demonstrate any sent sensitivity towards his brother.  phoebe was so important to holden and daniel recognized that but sadly didn't apply it to his life.  a nice story plot would have been daniel seeing holden's love for phoebe as an example of how he should treat his brother.

another thing i could not handle were the hippie parents.  they made no sense to me as characters. first and foremost, the mom does not send him to school for fear of germs but they live on a houseboat!  how sanitary can a houseboat be? especially one docked on a river, shouldn't she be concerned about malaria carrying mosquitos?  and i am all up for alternative methods of medicine, i mean i take garlic cloves over cough syrup to stop a cough but your kid has a couple of years of life and you don't opt for chemo? i don't know what year this was suppose to take place in, maybe the early 90s (there was a cellphone but no mention of internet) and i know organic food is a recent trend but i would have like to have seen hippie mom with some illegal garden and feeding her kids from that.  also i wish the dad had a backbone, i mean he obviously wanted daniel to have chemo.  

in the end, daniel runs away to new york and discovered that holden's new york is  no longer there.  he also discovered how rich holden probably was.  it's funny co as a kid, i didn't noticed but when i reread as an adult, i got it.  i thought the whole scene in trump tower was kinda bogus.  it was the 90s, era of heroin chic so maybe they saw daniel's luekemia-ridden body and thought dope fiend.  but a kid has a nosebleed don't you help versus kick him out of your building, wouldn't donald be worried about a lawsuit?

the story comes to an abrupt ending in which yay! daniel gets chemo thanks to the state of new york!  and by the way, the person i liked the most was the nurse in the er, she was the only one with common sense.  she was also the only believable character.

in closing, just like i said in my goodreads review, if you are want to read this based on your love for "catcher" don't, just reread catcher instead.