Be Light Like a Bird by Monika Schröder, 2016

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After the death of her father, twelve-year-old Wren finds her life thrown into upheaval. And when her mother decides to pack up the car and forces Wren to leave the only home she's ever known, the family grows even more fractured. As she and her mother struggle to build a new life, Wren must confront issues with the environment, peer pressure, bullying, and most of all, the difficulty of forgiving those who don't deserve it. A quirky, emotional middle grade novel set in Michigans Upper Peninsula, Be Light Like a Bird features well-drawn, unconventional characters and explores what it means to be a family and the secrets and lies that can tear one apart.
(240 pages)

This is a fairly melancholy book, but not in an overpowering way. I was a little worried about reading Be Light Like a Bird right now, just because I'm already emotionally overextended from stressing out about college stuff, but it actually turned out to be an almost cathartic read for me. Nothing like reading about a girl with a dead dad to put things in perspective, you know?

I'm moved tons of times, so I know how hard it can be to let go of a past home and live somewhere new, but Wren's moves are like a thousand times worse than any I've ever done. She lived in one place–one house–her entire life, and suddenly she's forced to leave all of that behind and start completely from scratch! Add to that the reason for their sudden move (her father's plane crash, which didn't even leave behind a body to be buried), the fact that she didn't even have anything of her father's to remember him by, and things become extremely bleak.

Considering how horrible her experiences were, I can completely understand Wren's anger at her mother and her desperation to put down roots and be absorbed into a support system–any support system. That's why I really kind of despised her mom for most of the book. Even at the end, when we learn a little more about the reasons for her actions, I'm still not really okay with them. Wren shouldn't have had to befriend strangers just to talk about how much she missed her father.

Now that we're on the topic of Wren's new friends, though, I have to say that I really loved them for the most part. I didn't particularly like Carrie, the popular girl Wren decides to befriend as a way of fusing herself into the social hierarchy at school, but I thought the way Wren responded to Carrie's nastiness was much more mature and realistic than the ways characters in other books have handled similar situations. Theo was another slightly stereotypical character (the nerdy unpopular boy who's secretly an ideal best friend for the main character), but somehow I didn't really mind. He and Wren bond over interesting things like bird-watching and photography, and Theo–who's mother died a few years before–is as a compassionate friend who knows exactly what Wren is going through. I hope the two of them stay side-by-side for a very long time.

Honestly, though, I can't put my finger on it but I just wanted . . . more from Be Light Like a Bird. I don't mean more in the sense of having a heavier dosage of Wren's grief, because I think Schröder handled that aspect of the story beautifully, but I just mean more details. If Wren lived her entire life in that one town, why does she barely even think about it? You'd think she'd feel the loss of her old classmates, who were at least familiar even if they weren't her best friends, and that she'd spend more time comparing her old home with this new one. More than anything, though, I honestly felt like we don't get a very good description of her father. We get flashbacks and memories with him in them, but I never feel like I truly know him as a complex and nuanced human being.

To be fair, the focus of Be Light Like a Bird really isn't on Wren's father or her old town, or even on her mother. The focus is on Wren's struggle to move on from her father's death, and I think it does a great job of that. Be Light Like a Bird is a beautiful book in its own way, and I recommend it to anyone who thinks they'd like it.

Disclaimer: I received a complimentary copy of this novel from the author in exchange for an honest review.

The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex, 2007

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It all starts with a school essay.
When twelve-year-old Gratuity (“Tip”) Tucci is assigned to write five pages on “The True Meaning of Smekday” for the National Time Capsule contest, she’s not sure where to begin. When her mom started telling everyone about the messages aliens were sending through a mole on the back of her neck? Maybe on Christmas Eve, when huge, bizarre spaceships descended on the Earth and the aliens – called Boov – abducted her mother? Or when the Boov declared Earth a colony, renamed it “Smekland” (in honor of glorious Captain Smek), and forced all Americans to relocate to Florida via rocketpod?
In any case, Gratuity’s story is much, much bigger than the assignment. It involves her unlikely friendship with a renegade Boov mechanic named J.Lo.; a futile journey south to find Gratuity’s mother at the Happy Mouse Kingdom; a cross-country road trip in a hovercar called Slushious; and an outrageous plan to save the Earth from yet another alien invasion.
Fully illustrated with “photos,” drawings, newspaper clippings, and comics sequences, this is a hilarious, perceptive, genre-bending novel by a remarkable new talent. the planet from a really big catastrophe.

(423 pages)

I heard really excellent things about The True Meaning of Smekday, so I decided to read it even though my mother really didn't like it (she thought it was stupid). After finishing it, on one hand I can see what she means about the book being stupid fluff - after all, it's a silly book about a girl and an alien driving across the country in a floating car after the aliens invaded Earth. Yeah, not a lot of depth there. But on a different level, a deeper level, The True Meaning of Smekday is much more than a silly romp through cliche action tropes. On that other level, it's actually mocking those cliches. Case in point: this quote from the book (which I added to Goodreads because it was too long to put in here).

Underneath the entertainment fluff, it's actually a pretty serious look at racism and "racial superiority." There are a lot of parallels between the Boov's colonization of Earth and the European colonization of America, and I think it's an amazing way to point out the terrible mistakes made in the past through a first-hand exploration of the colonization of the Boov, who honestly believe that humans are basically like dogs and don't really mind being relocated into cramped human reservations. The parallel is accentuated by one of the secondary characters, a Native American man who has spent his entire life dealing with bias. It's also extremely powerful, at least to me, that every time Tip talks about her mother she has to explain to people that her mom is Caucasian, not African American. The idea that a black girl can have a white mom doesn't jive with people's perceptions of race, and it throws them for a loop.

But enough about the serious stuff. Let's get into the characters who make this book so funny! Tip is a fun narrator because she's so down-to-earth and sarcastic. She is such a realist it's hilarious, and she's constantly saying things like "this is the way things should happen: [insert what usually happens in novels] . . . and, yeah, that didn't happen." This was incredibly refreshing to read, and made her feel so much more realistic. Her life isn't like something out of a storybook, things happen that are messy and ridiculous and embarrassing. And sure, crazy stuff happens that will never, ever happen in real life, but it never feels like the book jumps off the real end because Tip is just so . . . so human that it really feels like her story is perfectly reasonable.

Now let's talk about J.Lo. He has to be my favorite character! I love his way of speaking English, slurring words together and using them incorrectly at the funniest times. He's like a combination of an adult and a little kid, altering between adult-level skills (like dealing with complicated machinery) and making kiddy mistakes/having the simplistic reasoning skills of a child. It works out to be hilarious, and heartwarming, and I just want to bring J.Lo home and have a long conversation with him about, I don't know, just about anything so I can hear more of his goofy reasoning.

All in all, a great book that I highly recommend. It's the most engaging social commentary I've ever read, and the awesome thing about it is that you can totally not pick up on any of the underlying messages, and still have a great time with it! The message doesn't drive the plot, the characters drive the plot and the message just kind of hitches a ride underneath.

P.S. You've probably heard of the movie Home, which is based on The True Meaning of Smekday. I watched it right after finishing the book, and I really enjoyed it. You should definitely watch it if you're interested. Don't watch the movie first, though, because it cuts out a lot of the best parts from the book, and spoils the rest of them!