Customer Reviews

How To Say Goodbye In Robot

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There's been a lot of really good writing in the young adult fiction genre over the past few years, and "How to Say Goodbye in Robot" belongs at the very top of the list.

It's not what I'd call a plot-driven book... the story is about a girl, Bea, who's family has just moved for the millionth time. It's her senior year of high school and Bea is definitely a bit on the unconventional side; for fun, she and her mother put on costumes and pose like characters from old movies and then photograph themselves.

At the new school, Bea meets Jonah, known to his classmates as Ghost Boy in part because of his pale hair, flour-white skin, and eyes that are "gray as pond ice." As the story progresses, Bea gets to know Jonah, Jonah gets to know Bea, and they share a number of slightly surreal adventures together.

Part of what makes this book so good is that it avoids all the easy cliches that one so often encounters in this genre. Neither Bea nor Jonah are popular kids, but we aren't subjected to scenes of high school humiliations; it's their senior year of high school and everyone has sort of outgrown that kind of cruelty. Also, author Natalie Standiford manages to maintain a fine balance between the bleak and the fun.

Here's a brief excerpt to give you a sense of the writing:

I turned a corner and came to a small church. There was a head-stone near the path leading to the church's wooden doors. I stepped closer to read the headstone. It said FOR THE UNICORN CHILD.

That is so cool, I thought. What a funky town this was. I imagined a neighborhood Legend of the Unicorn Child, about a one-horned little boy who'd died tragically, hit by a car or shot by a mugger or maybe poisoned by lawn pesticides. The story of the Unicorn Child was so real to these people they'd erected a stone in his memory.

Then I read it again. The stone didn't say FOR THE UNICORN CHILD. It said FOR THE UNBORN CHILD.

----

Reading "How to Say Goodbye in Robot" feels like hanging out with a couple of really interesting good friends, making each other laugh and sharing thoughts and experiences and occasionally feeling a little bit melancholy together.

It's a mighty good thing and I recommend it completely.

This book is not about the plot. I don't want to spoil it by giving it away, but
there's really not much plot there. Girl moves to new city. Girl's parents are having trouble. Girl meets boy - ROMANCE DOES NOT DEVELOP.

OK, maybe that's different. Usually, these teen books involve that aspect of the relationship. The main character is Bea, AKA Robot Girl, who's just moved with her family to Baltimore. The other main character is Jonah, the 'Ghost Boy.'

The girl and boy become very close friends. In a strange way, it reminds me of the relationship between Bill Murray and Scarlett Johanssen in Lost in Translation, but these are teenagers, not adults.

This book is heavily character driven. Most of the characters are very well developed, even the minor characters. We get to see depth in the other kids in school, parents, even the circle of friends that develop around a late-night radio talk show.

There is a tragedy, parents separate, butmanage to get back together. An important character dies. The Bea/Jonah relationship is tested.

I am not sure how to classify the ending. Persoanlly, I think it ended well. The 2 main characters never 'hook up,' as young people like to say. There are some references to sex and both of the main characters (HS Seniors - minors) drink alcohol (quite often). There is a reference to an extramarital affair. A major character runs away from home.

I think the book is positive. It shows that young people can have important, emotionally significant and meaningful relationships with members of the opposite sex that do not involve romance or sex.

How to Say Goodbye in Robot is definitely on my list of favorites for 2009... if fact, it makes my favorite books ever list! With the amount of books I read, that isn't an easy feat!

The story How to Say Goodbye in Robot is painfully realistic at some points, but that just makes it hauntingly beautiful. I loved the old-timer radio show that Bea and Jonah listen to - it made me want to turn on the AM radio and find my own quirky insomniacs to help guide me through tough times.

There was something about Bea that I found easy to relate to. Before she found that late night radio show, Bea fantasized about death - not suicide - just the comfort and relaxation of being separate from life. I may not have been quite as instense as Bea, but I've often wondered about death as I lay awake an night too. Bea struggles with showing her emotions; she is afraid to grow attached to people and places because she often has to pack up and move as soon as she makes connections. I undestood Bea's confusion and her ability to accept the fact that, maybe, she is a robot: cold, unfeeling, and hard.

I loved Jonah. He was one of those characters that will draw a reader in like a moth to flame. He is so perfectly broken - I can see why Bea would be drawn to him in her own broken state.

How to Say Goodbye in Robot is not a love story, but it is terribly romantic. Jonah and Bea have so much chemistry and truly love one another, flaws and all. I found the sappy teenager in me yearning for them to be together as a couple. But Jonah and Bea are never a couple - they are so much more. To me, this novel emphasizes how important connections other than the physical are - and how those ties can run so much deeper.

I simply cannot write a review that will do this novel justice! It is one of my absolute favorites that I'll have on my go-to list for recommendations. How to Say Goodbye in Robot is a must read for 2009!

It took me much longer to figure out how I feel about this book than it took me to finish reading it. Ultimately, I could just never really identify with or root for any of the characters. I understand that the author wanted us to feel SOMETHING -- all authors do -- but she ultimately didn't write the book or her characters well enough for that to happen. Basically, the book is about two high school seniors who develop a bond over a shared love of radio and ultimately become so close that their love for one another defies the label of boyfriend or girlfriend.

None of the characters was three-dimensional enough to jump off the page. They all felt pretty flat, especially the adults. The parents were crammed into whatever mold was convenient for the plot, with Jonah's father being "cold" and Bea's mother being "crazy". There was never sufficient explanation given for why either of these characters acted this way. Even Jonah and Bea weren't developed enough for me to wholly believe that their relationship could evolve so fast and so deeply that they'd come to mean that much to one another in such a short period of time. The fact is that I could never forget I was doing anything more than reading about two characters, rather than a real story about two people.

The ending is unexpected, and I give the author credit for not having the main characters ever get together, despite the fact that I spent the entire book waiting for it to happen. She doesn't go along with the typical boy/girl conventions of YA literature, so she gets points for that. Sometimes it's good to NOT get what you want. (I am speaking of myself here, not the characters.) And the ending makes more sense if their friendship never becomes sexual. However, she loses a lot of points for the problems mentioned above, and for the radio show portions of her story. Maybe you have to be a lover of talk radio to understand the attraction, but I would have thought that a good writer could handle these scenes in a way that let people who ARE NOT late-nite radio devotees in on what's so special about it. Ultimately, I wound up skipping most of these sections because they added nothing to the plot. I skimmed them, stopping to read only when one of the conversations featured Jonah or Bea calling in, and was still able to understand everything that was going on in the story. Standiford should have tried to really integrate these pieces into her story in more organic way, so that they didn't seem just wedged in as a way to eat up a few pages of the story and pass some time. Had she succeeded, her book would have been a very unique and different entry into the YA Fiction genre, instead of just something that I already said "goodbye" to and won't be picking up again.

I read a great review of this book that made it seem deep and tragic. I expected great character development and an intimate look at a profound connection between two people. What I got was one-dimensional characters involved in an unhealthy and unrealistic relationship.

Throughout reading the book I kept wondering when Bea was going to wake up and stop being Jonah's little follower. I felt like I never got to know her. Her character was to be Jonah's puppet, that's it. She never evolved. Jonah was egotistical, self-centered, and loveless. He made great demands on Bea and didn't seem to care at all for her well being. His bad behavior was supposed to be justified because of his life's tragedies, but the author could not convince me that his actions were warranted.

What frustrates me is that this story attempts to convince the reader that the relationship between Bea and Jonah had great meaning and great love when it's really a story about a girl who wastes her senior year being an A-hole's tag-along--without ever realizing it.

Natalie Standiford's debut novel is wise and quirky, expressive and humorous, and completely unforgettable.The story doesn't start out in any amazing way. For the first few pages, it's just a regular old story. But then, with the introduction of [radio show] and Jonah's reaction to Bea's attempts at conversation, a completely different story is started. What's Jonah's problem? Who tells someone to listen to something and then not want to discuss it? Who IS Ghost Boy? But, of course, there is never an easy answer or even an answer at all.

For most of the novel, we have no clue who Jonah really is. He's a mystery and his actions never follow any set pattern or personality. Usually, I like to be able to get inside of a guy's head but not knowing Jonah just kept me going throughout the whole novel. When he finally cracked, when we finally get inside his head a teeny bit, it's shocking. Unexpected. Scary. He was one of those characters that will draw a reader in like a moth to flame. He is so perfectly broken - I can see why Bea would be drawn to him in her own broken state.

Though the many, many mentions of alcohol and underage drinking are slightly irking, they don't really detract from the message of book in any way, and some of the more interesting scenes take place in a sort of bar. How to Say Goodbye in Robot is a sensitive, smart, and multifaceted read that is realistic and poignant without being mushy. The end, while surprising, is satisfying, and will leave you thinking long after the final page.

This book was fairly uninteresting and rather a disappointment. The synopsis of the book clashed with the main characters persona and wasn't presented as it really was. Most of the characters were hard to find believable and it felt like I was reading the diary of a 14 year old girl who lacked much insight. Middle school girls might find it interesting but too immature for high school students. Drinking is depicted in it of underage kids who are able to walk into bars and be served alcohol. Not a very believable book.

Bea's family moves all the time. Now they're in a small town for her senior year, where everyone has known everyone else since kindergarten. Bea tells herself she doesn't care, until she meets Jonathan, who everyone else calls Ghost Boy. He's pale and quiet and very white. The class held a funeral for him once, complete with eulogy about how much they would have missed him if he'd ever said or done anything memorable, and after that they'd jump like they'd seen a ghost every time he walked into the room. Turns out Jonathan actually had a twin brother who had been in a car crash with their mother. Shortly after Beatrice meets him, he finds out his father has been lying to him for years, and his brother is alive and in a home for the mentally disabled. Jonathan decides he's going to rescue his brother, and things spiral from there.

This book has a desperate beauty to the friendship between Bea and Jonathan. The focus is definitely friendship, with dysfunctional families a close second. I don't think the friendship was a healthy one for Bea, but having a healthy friendship with someone as emotionally scarred as Jonathan would probably be impossible.

The characters were so real and so peculiar, in ways that didn't feel designed for their audience (whether that's the readers or the other people in the book). I don't think I'd particularly like Bea and Jonathan, or the things they did together. But I can understand wholehearted glee at something you connect with that just sounds weird when you try to describe it to other people (like the late night radio show they listened to), or dreading what everyone else is convinced will thrill you, and proving yourself right (like dating the most popular boy). A lot of stories about "weird" teens make them sound like they're rebelling for rebelling's sake. And lots of kids do. But in this case, it genuinely felt like Bea and Jonathan were being true to themselves, and were okay with being different because what everyone else liked would make them miserable.

This book made me cry. It was heart-wrenching.

rst thing I'm going to say about this book is something very important so you should pay attention. Are you paying attention? If you are looking for a book that goes like this:

Boy meets girl. They hate each other. They kiss & fall in love. They fight. They share a great big moment of awww and live happily ever after. The End.

Then this isn't the book for you. Seriously. BUT if you are sick of all that stuff or don't care or want to read a well-written book with great characters and stands out in the crowd--then look no further. ROBOT is for you.

Bea has just moved to a new place and she meets Ghost Boy, real name Jonah. (The people in his life call him that because he's pale and you never really notice him.) Bea notices him--or he notices her--and unlikely friendship is formed, bonded on being an outcast and a late night talk radio show. The whole story is their journey through the school year. The movement of their friendship from unlikely friends to lunches and dates (with other people). They deal with lies and truths and secrets and less-than-perfect families. They deal with pain and heartbreak, loss, fear and love. And don't forget the late night talk show. When it's thrown into the mix, things always get interesting.

I love many things about this book. I love the way their stories are so different, yet the same. Both have been kept in the dark about a major event. Both have "crazy" parents. Both are given nicknames they don't like but end up defining them. (Ghost Boy and Robot Girl, if you wondered.) Both enjoy art. Both want something more than they have right now. These are the things that make them friends. That, and they are both so very lonely.

I love the way their friendship develops. It's full of emotions and laughter and inside jokes. It's a discovery that they go on together to figure out who they are individually. Life wasn't meant to walk alone--and until they meet each other, Jonah and Bea were doing exactly that. I love they find something they were missing in each other--and it wasn't romantic. Everything is romantic, like people sometimes forget that teens can have best friends that are boy/girl and it doesn't end in kissing.

This is an a-typical YA novel. There's quirky talk show characters (whom I adore). The parents are around, even if they make big mistakes. The love is deep and real and platonic and you see it happen. Everyone grows together: parents, friends, crazy talk show character, Jonah, Bea. It's all in different ways but it's there. It's lovely. As soon as I finished ROBOT I had to sit there. It was so amazing, and my heart was breaking. It was good kind of heartbreak, mixed with a bad kind. And when it was over, I wondered what was happening next but I was content with not knowing. I think that's a really
great thing--the not knowing.

I have this new theory that I just developed yesterday (it's still in development*). I'm calling it the Hororux-Reading Hypothesis Metaphor (or the HRHM.) The HRHM basically is this: Voldemort has horcruxes, items which he's chosen to store a piece of his soul, and they keep him alive. Books are like a horcrux*. Really. We read a book that speaks to us (which is definitely not every book we read) and then it becomes part of us. It steals a little piece of our soul and whenever we open the book again, we're alive. Whatever we were looking for is found in that book. HOW TO SAY GOODBYE IN ROBOT is one of my horcruxes; it will always have a piece of my soul.

It might be an exaggeration to say this book changed my life, but it's close enough, so I'll say it anyway: This book got me off the Gossip Girl addiction, something I am eternally grateful for (and eternally embarrassed ever existed in the first place), and should be heralded as the greatest book written in the past decade. Or something. I cried at the end of it, both because it was sad and because it was over.
I wish I had more thumbs just so I could raise 'em all in praise of this book.
A definite must-read, if you can't tell by the massive gushfest going on over here.

-BB