the thing about jellyfish. ali benjamin. (318)

i picked up ali benjamin's the thing about jellyfish because it is national book finalist in the young adult category.  i wasn't sure what the story was about, but liked the title and figured since it was nominated, it should be good.  and it was.

the thing about jellyfish was the story of a young girl, suzy, that recently lost her best friend.  the lost was sudden, her best friend, franny, died on a beach, her heart just stopped.  as a result, suzy went mute a couple of months after her friend's death.  losing a best friend is difficult at any age, but to have lost your best friend at 12, is even more difficult.   however, age isn't the only factor, as it is slowly revealed, franny and suzy had grown apart.  franny had become one of the "cool" yet mean girls, and their last incident was when suzy froze pee and put it inside franny's locker.  suzy was never able to apologize and this guilt only add to her difficulty to cope.

frozen pee was extreme, but when suzy explained her reasoning for it, it made sense, though it was still awful.  suzy was a socially awkward kid, i actually read her as autistic, but when i googled to see if that was the intent of the author, i can not find anything on it.  i assumed that she was because it was noted when she was younger on a report card that she wasn't adapt at making friends.  also, the way that she fixated on subjects ie jellyfish, i assumed that she was autistic.  however, i mean everyone is awkward at that age, so that could be it as well.

so the thing about jellyfish in this novel is that suzy became fixated on the theory that franny died after being stung by an irukandij jellyfish.  her obsession about the jellyfish fueled by her need to understand what happen to her friend.  the novel (which i absolutely loved) was set up like a science project with the following sections:  purpose, hypothesis, background, variables, procedure, and results, and we see suzy test her theory and ultimately come to terms with the lost of her friend. i have to add that the novel is also very informative, i learned alot about jellyfish and other great facts.  for example, that the average middle school student has about 20 billion atoms from shakespeare, which means that suzy has some of franny's atoms, and we have atoms of any of the people that we lost.  (what a great lesson for kids to learn when dealing with a loss.)

i also loved how in the end, suzy found friends that understood her and didn't think she was "weird".  

this novel is really great and i highly recommend it, especially if you have a young reader.  it is helpful not only with grieving the loss of a love one, but also helpful with those awkward years.  it shows kids that we are all a little weird, and that you will find friends that will love you for who you are. 

confetti girl. diana lopez. (227)

confetti girl caught my eye while subbing in a fourth grade class.  i thought to myself, this is my life and so i instagramed it.  i also decided to check it out from the library.

confetti girl was seriously my life.  well at least the cover and the first three pages.  so as an introduction to the novel, there are instructions on how to make cascarones . . . or confetti eggs!!!!!!  seriously my life.  i discovered confetti eggs via my cousin tina, who had them one easter and her house.  one year i took the extras to coachella and they were life changing!!  and they totally became our thing.  after that every year, i made confetti eggs and decorated them based on the bands that were playing:

they improved over the years but i will say that i am pretty legit!  so was super excited to see cascarones mentioned in this book.  (random sidenote:  my friend once saw cascarones at olvera street in la and was shocked because he thought it was just something i did, not a mexican thing. lol). oh i should add, lina and her friends are mexican.  they live in corpus christi and yes, the selena convention center is totally named-dropped!

the next thing was the dicho, or mexican saying, listed for chapter one.  all the chapters have dichos and they are all compiled in a list at the end, but the one that started of the book was "los amigos mejores son libros" or "books are your best friend"!!! which i totally believe! though lina, the main characger, wasn't a bookworm, her father was and also an english teacher.  books that were named-dropped included watership down (which i need to read) and one hundred years of solitude!!! 

the other dichos i enjoyed were:

buñolero, ¡haz tus buñelos!

(buñelos maker, make your own buñelos, or mind your own business).

*i could like this one partially because buñelos are delish!

las mentiras no tienen pies

(lies don't have get so they can't travel on their own.)

el camarón que se duerme se lo lleva la corriente 

(the shrimp that goes to sleep gets carried away by the current.)

hasta el diablo una vex fue ángel

(even the devil was once an angel)

great words of advice and mini life lessons for lina and the reader!

and last but not least, lina had a sock collection!  just like me!!!!  i know seriously my life.  but the parallels stop there. 

confetti girl is the story of lina, short for apolonia, a girl in middle school.  she lives with her father and had recently lost her mother to an illness.  this lost along with being a preteen resulted in some drama in her life.

lina's trouble started when her english grade began to drop.  bitter toward her father's pressure to love books, lina failed english and was unable to play sports.  i thought this was good lesson for kids.   the teacher did not make an exception for her and she had to suffer the consequences of letting her grades slip.  

on top of that her best friend, vanessa, got a new boyfriend and began to neglect lina.  though lina had a crush that later became her boyfriend, but they had issues too.  lina was then constantly fighting with her best friend and boyfriend.  there was also a boy that teased lina and i thought it would be revealed that he liked her, but didn't happen.

in the end, thanks to the help of the school therapist, lina discovered what she needed to do to get life back on track.  lina had been making up summaries for watership down because she was not reading it.  howrver,  the summaries were her life told via the characters.  the school therapist saw this as a means for lina to work through all of her problems. the therapist had lina finish her story which then became the basis for her talking to her dad about her problems.  in the end, everything gets resolved and ends in a huge confetti fight!

a cute read and great for preteen girls. and also because ever girl should know how to make confetti eggs!!!