Customer Reviews

Ballads of Suburbia

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I can count on one hand the number of books that have "wow"ed me this year. I've read some meh, average, better than average, and the occasional awesome book, but only 4 or 5 that have made me go "wow." This book is one of that wowed me.

This book is definitely not an easy read- it's full of hard-hitting issues: drugs, cutting, all sorts of others. With heavy books like this, I usually need to stop every so often and think about what I'm reading, but I could not put this one down. I found myself going "one more chapter, just one more" and then I'd go from page 100 to 250 without even realizing it. Reading about Kara is heartbreaking- I almost cried at one point- but I was compelled to keep reading about the many ups and downs in her life. There's never a dull moment- even in the beginning, when older Kara is speaking, not teenage Kara.

The ballads- stories of the characters' lives and why they act like they do, basically- give each character unexpected depth. Many of the characters make awful, questionable, or even bizarre choices, and although the other characters only spoke for about a chapter, their motives are explained and their personalities make so much more sense. Kara is given more depth as well from the epilogue in the beginning of the book- seeing how Kara ends up makes reading about her journey more interesting, and also makes it easier to see how her decisions effect her.

All that really needs to be said about Ballads of Suburbia is that it's spectacular, and that I can't recommend it enough.

I loved Kuehnert's first book, I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone, so I was very excited for this one and I was in no way disappointed. Ballads of Suburbia is a fantastic book and one that will stay with me for a long time to come.

I graduated from a Midwestern high school in the nineties. I'm a couple years older than the kids in this book are, but for the most part, they are of my generation. The music mentioned in this book is the same stuff I was listening to at the time and am still listening to today. Kuehnert's work transports me to another time and I can't get enough of it.

Her writing is incredibly powerful and each separate "ballad" in the book captures that power. Each of these vivid character studies link seamlessly together to tell the story of not just this group of lost souls, but of an entire generation. At the heart of the story is Kara, who without knowing it, really holds the group together. As she starts to lost touch, we see her world crumbling around her and we are powerless to stop it.

Ballads perfectly portrays that slippery slope of adolescence. It's so easy to lose your way when everything and everyone around you is changing so rapidly. Often as teenagers, I think there's this fear that if we don't catch up, we'll be passed by, at least that's how I felt in high school. This was just a really moving book and at its heart it is very hopeful and optimistic.

It seems really bold to call someone the voice of a generation, but that's how I see Kuehnert. I may not have shared the experiences of the characters in the book, but I recognize their journey and their voices. Stephanie Kuehnert is amazing and I will gladly read anything she writes from here on out.

This book is really interesting the whole way through. Kudos to Stephanie for another very entertaining book!

Kara comes back to her hometown in the suburbs of Chicago. She's come back to finally meet her best friend's kid. She's come back because she's been gone too long. This book isn't about her coming back though, it's about why she had to leave. This is the Ballad of Kara McNaughton and her friends. A song about sex, drugs, punk rock, loss, death, running away, and trying to figure out who the hell you are.

This book hit me in the first few pages. I was zipped right back to my high school years. I'm reading and thinking, ' hey this is my story, my life'. I can totally relate to Kara going back home after being away from all the people and all the things from when she was a different person. A little while later while reading it though I was losing touch and relate-ability. No one I hung around with did hard drugs, I never really went to parties. In a sense though Kara did the same run through of emotions and mistakes we all do, just with a different backdrop. By the end of the book I was back on track feeling as Kara felt, crying hard for her and for myself. I enjoyed this book so much, I loved the whole concept and how everyone wrote their Ballads. I appreciated how heartfelt they could be when they knew that the only other people reading their words are people who spilled their own on the pages. Kuehnert did an epic job writing Kara's and the others. Most authors are older people trying to write a voice of a teen and some of the time that voice isn't real it doesn't sound like a teen really does. Stephanie hits the nail on the head here, her voices are spot on capturing the true teen essence of dialogue and thoughts. I applaud this book, it will be read and reread in years to come as a true coming-of-age tale that teens will really relate to. If you weren't already psyched about this book; let me tell you, you should be.

Kara's favorite songs are ballads, the ones that tell about someone's life and numerous screw ups, the songs people can relate to and learn from. Because Kara's first three years of high school were full of screw ups, and not all of them her own. Insecurity that lead to cutting, casual highs turning into drug addiction, secrets, lies, and suicides all plagued her life in a deluge she thought she was dealing with until her near heroin overdose finally woke her up. Memories documented in her and her friends' "Stories of Suburbia" notebook will never fade, but now, it's Kara's turn to pay her due and write her own ballad.

When I first read a synopsis for Ballads of Suburbia, I was excited to see more from Kuehnert after I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone, which I loved, but also wary because I was afraid Kuehnert was being too ambitious. Thankfully, though, I was wrong on the second account; my initial fear that Ballads of Suburbia's large cast would be overwhelming to the story proved false. I really must say that Kuehnert does a fantastic storytelling job in this novel, from setting the story up, to the realistic characters, to the overarching theme, that people are more than just a snapshot of their lives. Kuehnert paints a very gritty and depressing picture of a "suburb" of Chicage, a grim place only an invisible line marks as no longer the city filled with dysfunction and all the wrong ways to escape. This setting makes the characters easier to understand, because each comes with a history of at least one hardship or difficulty continuing to affect their lives. I found that for me, Ballads of Suburbia was less about the plot than it was how Kara responds to it. I mean, the turning point of the story is revealed in the first few pages of the novel. So even though most of this novel was extremely sad and depressing, the ending was slightly more uplifting and inspirational.

Ballads of Suburbia is another great novel for fans of Kuehnert's debut, I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone, Purge by Sarah Darer Littman, Perfect by Natasha Friend, and Identical by Ellen Hopkins. I'm thrilled Kuehnert was able to pull off such an incredible story in Ballads of Suburbia despite its depressing content and continue to look forward to her next work.

Kara hasn't been back to Oak Park since the end of junior year, when a heroin overdose nearly killed her and sirens heralded her exit. Four years later, she returns to face the music. Her life changed forever back in high school: her family disintegrated, she ran around with a whole new crowd of friends, she partied a little too hard, and she fell in love with gorgeous bad-boy Adrian, who left her to die that day in Scoville Park....Amid the music, the booze, the drugs, and the drama, her friends filled a notebook with heartbreakingly honest confessions of the moments that defined and shattered their young lives. Now, finally, Kara is ready to write her own.

A painfully realistic, no-holds bar depiction of teenage life in 21st century suburbia. Parents who work full-time, who are divorced and caught up in their own struggles...unwitting accomplices in the downfall of their own children. This point of the book just stood out to me so much. It felt like a slowly spreading plague of destruction.

Kara is your typical high school student with the regular ups and downs of being an adolescent until her father decides to move out. His departure initiates a spiral of bad decisions that ultimately leads to Kara overdosing on heroin. Although she has used other drugs before, Kara is introduced to heroin by Adrian, the "bad boy" she falls for. As she describes it:

"I couldn't have scripted a better entrance for my first love, as ripe with impending disaster as the beginning of Mickey and Mallory's romance in Natural Born Killers."

I really didn't want to put this book down. I found myself hanging on every word, stressing out about what would happen next. The vulnerability of these characters is palpable and the consequences of their actions is heartbreaking. Thankfully, not everything is gloom and doom. Expertly woven through out the story is a small yet consistent flicker of hope. Kara's relationship with her mom and brother show that some bonds are not easily broken.

Adolescents will certainly relate to this tale of broken families, drug addiction and lure of premature independence. A cautionary tale that is subtle and honest...teens love and need their peers, but nothing replaces the strength and support of families.

I loved this book...read it now! Best for 9th grade and up.

Whoa. Ballads of Surburbia was a gritty, real and honest book. It doesn't hold back AT ALL. It's one of those books you couldn't really say you enjoyed per say but are really glad you read. Another book I've said that about is Wintergirls but I much prefer Ballads of Surburbia, I sometimes felt like the book was suffocating me, but there is a reward within it when reading this book.

While the story was rather depressing at times and hard to read it was also exciting and tender. I love how the story of Kara's years in Oak Park are framed by her homecoming. You know she's come out of this almost disaster zone ok, but how did she make it, how did she get there? That's the story of Ballads of Suburbia. I love that the author didn't just start with Kara in high school, she picked pieces of her younger years that made her the person she was when she started high school, and because of that Kara comes off as a really sympathetic character. Yes, at times I wanted to smack her upside the head but for the most part you were taking the journey with her wanting her to come out of it ok.

Another interesting thing the author does is share all the main characters ballads (or stories) in the form of a notebook they all share, giving a snapshot of their background and the reason they are the way they are. And because of that all the character come off as sympathetic, some more so than others but still they all do. Weaving these rich stories for all the main characters makes the story a lot deeper than you would expect, it's really packed to the brim with emotion.

*Ignore if you don't want spoilers*

I discovered Stephanie Kuehnert through the teen website Rookie Mag. She wrote a short story on there and I was completely blown away by it -- I knew then that I had to check out her published stuff. First I looked up 'I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone', and loved the summary, but then I saw Suburbia beneath it. It called to me for some reason, the photo on the cover of it, the design of the title. I know they say you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, but like the first time I saw a photo of the members of Nirvana, I knew it would be something amazing.

For months I looked for Suburbia in several book stores in my city here in Texas, but the only one near that carried the book was the city next door and having just turned sixteen years old in November, I didn't have the transportation. The opportunity came to me a week before Christmas. I knew what I had to do the second my dad handed me his credit card and told me to order some stuff I wanted.I opened up Firefox, and then the page I had saved to my computer months prior, and added Suburbia to my cart.

I got the book three days after Christmas. I was so eager to read and I wasn't disappointed -- it's seriously the best book I've ever read, and this isn't coming from some ignorant lemming who thinks Twilight is a good book and listens to All Time Low and other mediocre garbage. I'm really into literature and the great writers; I just think that Stephanie is one of those "great". The way this is written so raw, realistic and tear-inducing almost like if the events in the book actually did take place.

I've never felt so full and empty at the same time.

Only naive people think that happy endings truly exist, or that's just my opinion at least. The different characters' journals were so different, yet heart-breaking, they all had a unique voice. I have to say, though, that Christian's story was the one that made me cry the most and hardest, even though he did end up being a total dirtbag. And then the way Maya went. And Quentin. And how Adrian and Kara did reconcile in the end, and their were still obvious sparks, but they didn't end up together like I had [secretly] been routing for. The ending was amazing. I'm a writer myself and I really despise when books have happy endings, even if they're bittersweet, but this ending was almost depressing.

Books don't get more real than this.If you don't have this book in your shelf, you might -- actually you better go out and buy this or order it ASAP. Ugh, it's so amazing flaskdl;fl;s;fkds

You won't regret.

Ballads of Suburbia tells the story of Kara McNaughton. She's just starting high school when her life takes a turn for the worse; her best friend isn't there as before, her parents are in an unhealthy relationship and her little brother, Liam, is looking for her attention. Kara just wants to be social, to have a friend. Then she meets Maya, and having her as a friend, Kara now feels accepted, especially in Scoville Park. There she meets a group of other teenagers, including Adrian, a bad boy with a very heartbreaking past. Kara's life keeps going downhill, until finally one day, she overdoses in Scoville Park.

First off, this book was dark. It deals with a lot of heavy subjects, such as suicide, divorce, drugs, overdose, violence and self injury. It's not a pretty book. It wasn't what I was expecting but I'm glad that I read it. The book starts with an epilogue. It's been four years since Kara has been in Chicago. The book is more of a flashback of her high school years; from a freshman to the summer before her senior year and it all takes place during the 90's.

Kara is --believe it or not-- a "good" girl. She doesn't really get into trouble. But when her best friend, Stacey, has to move, Kara has to face high school alone. Stacey begins to push her away and to deal with the changes in her life, Kara begins to cut, seeking relief. Stacey had "introduced" her to pot, and now with Maya and her friends in Scoville Park, Kara starts to use other drugs. She's now social and a "party girl", but underneath, she's still the good girl she once was. There's a breaking point, and from there on, she just becomes someone completely different. She uses various drugs until she sticks to heroin because it erases the thoughts out of her mind.

There were a lot of characters in this book. A lot. I had difficulty keeping up with which one was who sometimes. The cool thing about this book and the other characters was that Stephanie Kuehnert gave the characters a chapter to tell their stories, or "ballads" like Kara names them. The "ballads" are in a notebook, which also has newspaper clippings of crazy stories about things that happened in the suburbs.

Let's talk a little about Adrian. He's just pure bad. I mean, I felt sorry for him, especially when you read his ballad. He treated Kara super sweet sometimes but he was just a bad influence in her life. Don't get me wrong, you do feel bad for him but there are other times where you just can't believe what he's doing. That's what bothered me about him -- that he didn't seem to care about the consequences of his actions.

I was super interested in the overdose part and when I read it, I was like, "that's it?"; I was expecting more description, more drama, but then again, Kara was the one overdosing and she was the one telling the story. I wanted to read more about what happened to her after that, which the author went into, but she just have us a little and it left me wanting to know more about what had happened.

There just so many things I would love to talk to you about in this book, like her brother, Liam, and all of her friends, especially Maya and Christian. You feel so much for the other characters!

When you start to read this book, you'll get so into it and keep flipping the pages. The hardest thing for me was picking it back up and continue reading it.

Can I tell you that I cried? I did, especially in the last chapters. I don't even know how to explain it. This is great book. Just know that is not a fun read. It's heavy and packed with such a raw, realistic content.

I can't dissect this book in a mere review. It's been a while since I read it, but it still overwhelms me. It's so atmospheric and heartbreakingly painful and packed with such stellar characters, reading Ballads was like experiencing everything that Kara and her friends went through. I could talk about so many things -- how the Chicago suburbs of the 90s came alive on the page, how unbelievably hard it was to read about these teens watching everything crumbling around them, how singularly dependent they were on substance yet in spite of the self-abuse involved, they stuck together like a group of lost young people trying to salvage whatever they can of their young lives and how they each recorded haunting personal "ballads" that showed so much raw vulnerability that I'm left awed at the brilliance of this book.

There are so many ballads. Achy breaky country songs. Mournful pop songs. Then there's the rare punk ballad, the ballad of suburbia: louder, faster, angrier . . . till it drowns out the silence.

Yes, this book is hard because the author isn't afraid to hold back anything. She bluntly talks about cutting, overdoses and death. It's dark and probably difficult for some but the little hopes and dreams of this gaggle of disillusioned teens shine through occasionally and make this powerhouse of a book, a luminous and coming-of-age tale.

Nothing I say can sum up how much this book affected me but Stephenie Kuehnert is officially my hero now and I can only thank her for writing it.