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30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Our town, August 22, 2006
This review is from: Shug (Hardcover)
Nope. I didn't want to read, "Shug". I just didn't. I took one look at its cool cover and thought it was a piece of YA literature. By and large, as a children's librarian I tend to avoid teen books. It was only when fellow children's librarians (4 or so) insisted that this book would be beloved by kids too that I caved in and picked it up. If ever the world of librarianship is further subdivided into Children's Librarians, YA Librarians, and Tween Librarians, I can tell you right here and now that "Shug" will belong firmly to the latter. Covering everything from a girl's first kiss to getting her period to dealing with the separation of boys and girls once they're hit by the puberty stick, this book is a summarization of adolescence that smacks of truth.
Annemarie a.k.a. Shug, just realized something while sitting on her front porch with her oldest friend, Mark. She loves him. This is a little strange when she considers that she's known the guy practically all her life. Still, there's no denying her current feelings. They just couldn't have come at a worse point in their lives. Once this summer is over, Mark and Annemarie will be entering Junior High for the very first time. Now Annemarie will have to deal with the various school cliques and cruelties. She'll have to face up to the fact that her often drunk mother and too absent father may be having more than their regular marital difficulties. She'll accept that her best friend Elaine has more on her mind these days than regular girl problems. And she'll need to figure out what exactly she's going to do, if anything, about the Mark situation.
It sounds trite. It sounds like its been done before. But the remarkable thing about "Shug" is that it reads like nothing I've ever read. What I can't figure out is how author Jenny Han has found a way to capture with pinpoint accuracy what it feels like to be twelve. Shug is twelve incarnate and Han knows how to zero in on the deadly seriousness with which every adolescent thinks they are entitled. The pain of a crush becomes, "I never know love felt like cancer of the throat". And then, of course, there's the sudden difference between how you've dealt with boys in the past and how you're dealing with them now. Shug goes to hang out with Mark and his friends and suddenly everything that was once simple becomes complicated. She can't be herself or even join in with their conversation. "They take everything and breathe up all the air in the room".
I loved Han's writing too. She has a sense of humor, saving the book from the overearnest drama inherent in tween narratives. For example, when Shug attempts to describe her "perfect" older sister, she mentions that, "She is smaller than me, the kind of small that boys want to scoop up and hold on to real tight". In comparison, our heroine feels that she has, "no womanly curves to speak of. I can't fill a pudding cup with what I've got". And with this writing Han is able to put into words the moral uncertainty that comes with subverting yourself to fit into middle school society. When Shug unceremoniously dumps a girl named Sherilyn as a friend, she notes, not without a little sorrow, that, "I know I could be cool if I didn't have Sherilyn hanging on to me. It's like trying to shimmy up a rope with a moose tied to your ankles. You've just gotta cut that moose loose". Kudos to Han for not ending the book with Shug learning an "important lesson" about the true meaning of friendship blah blah blah. You may feel sorry for Sherilyn, but be honest with yourself. Would YOU have been friends with her in middle school? After all, when invited to a sleepover you know that, "She's the one the mom has to befriend". So true it literally stings when you read it.
Characters. Want `em? You got `em. In fact the most alarming and complex character comes in the form of Shug's alternately beloved and loathed mother. Mrs. Wilcox was born in Clementon, left, returned with an education, and has lived in contempt of her contemporaries ever since. She's the kind of woman who names her daughters after Alice Walker novels. Who can't cook but lets her children know that their one job in life is to get out of Clementon someday. She also drinks to excess and is a fairly bad mother. Still, you sympathize with her, even when you shouldn't. Whole novels could be based on Mrs. Wilcox. In her, Han finds the ideal mother, villain, and anti-hero. Other characters fare just as well. There's Jack, a boy that Shug has to tutor and who has always been her nemesis. Adults reading the book will recognize the role he'll play right from the start. Kids will find it more of a surprise.
The fact that the title character's name comes from a character from "The Color Purple" was kind of amusing. I mean, we're in whitebread country here. The only person of color in this entire book is the title character's best friend Elaine who happens to be American born Korean. Now the book takes place in a town named Clementon in the South, but Clementon is never really ever pinpointed on a map. It's a small town with all the good and the bad that comes with such a place. And the bad, I suspect, is directly tied into the lack of any race other than that of whitey.
When I was sixteen I fell desperately in love with a boy with whom I was the best of friends. The fact that he once literally said I was "like a sister to him" didn't prove to be the deterrent I'm sure he'd hoped it would. So when fellow author Gigi Amateau wrote the book blurb, "From the first page, Jenny Han transported me back to a time when I loved a boy with all my heart and held my breath for him to love me, too", I couldn't have said it better myself. This is all the pain and brief pleasure a person feels when they first begin to get serious crushes. Honest, open, beautiful, and concise. In "Shug" readers (oh fine... GIRL readers) will discover an author that truly understands what they're going through and that it is survivable. This is early adolescence synthesized in a single perfect novel.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Courtesy of Teens Read Too, May 31, 2006
This review is from: Shug (Hardcover)
Annemarie Wilcox, known to her family as Shug, is twelve-years old, tall, flat-chested, and nowhere near the type of girl she wants to be. Shug also believes that, ow that she's twelve, she's at the perfect age to receive her first kiss, and she knows just who she wants to give it to her--her best friend, Mark Findley, the true and actual boy-next-door. Well, actually, the boy down the street, but it's close enough. The only problem is that Mark doesn't show any interest in seeing Shug in the same way she sees him. For Mark, the perfect girl is Celia, Shug's beautiful, popular older sister.
Thus begins the summer of Shug's twelfth year, and it's not going anything like what she had planned. She's suddenly seeing everyone in her life in a totally different way, and she's not so sure that she likes what she sees. Her mother, who she once thought of as deep and sophisticated, now seems the opposite. The North Carolina native who went "up North" to college isn't suave and chic--she's snobby, standoffish, and an alcoholic. Her dad, a businessman who frequently travels away from home, comes home less and less and stays for even shorter amounts of time. Even beautiful Celia, who seems to have the perfect life, seems to be changing right before Shug's eyes.
And then there's Mark, who she's almost given up hope on. Now that she has to help Jack Connelly, the bad boy of her school who has gotten in more trouble than she can name, with his homework, she even finds herself seeing him in a new light. Is he really as bad as everyone thinks? Can people change so significantly in even short amounts of time? And as for Shug, is she really the girl she thought she was?
Reading SHUG is like eating an entire carton of Rocky Road ice cream. It's a sweet indulgence that you know you should eat slowly, yet you still find yourself devouring it as if it's your last meal on Earth. SHUG is like that. You'll get caught up in the life of Annemarie and her family, in her friendships and heartbreaks, in her internal struggle to be liked and loved for who she is. At first glance SHUG is a normal coming-of-age story, but once you start reading you'll realize it's anything but normal. Kudos to Jenny Han for this glimpse into Shug's life, and that of her family and friends. It's a story you won't soon forget.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dagnabbit!, May 17, 2006
This review is from: Shug (Hardcover)
I write young adult novels, and I wish I had written _this_ one! Do you know how, when you watch the best tightrope walkers, they make it look so easy you forget they're doing something insanely hard and scary?
Well, Jenny Han is a great tightrope walker, because it's extraordinarily hard to write a breakout, literary young adult novel about daily life. But when you're reading _Shug_, you feel like the book is effortless -- you're simply _there_, in the life of a 12-year-old girl who sees everything.
This book succeeds wildly, both as entertainment and as literature.
Wow . . .
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