Title: The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls
Author: Julie Schumacher
Expected publication: May 8th 2012 by Random House Children’s Books
Source: Received for review from the publisher via NetGalley
Goodreads summary:
I’m Adrienne Haus, survivor of a mother-daughter book club. Most of us didn’t want to join. My mother signed me up because I was stuck at home all summer, with my knee in a brace. CeeCee’s parents forced her to join after cancelling her Paris trip because she bashed up their car. The members of “The Unbearable Book Club,” CeeCee, Jill, Wallis, and I, were all going into eleventh grade A.P. English. But we weren’t friends. We were literary prisoners, sweating, reading classics, and hanging out at the pool. If you want to find out how membership in a book club can end up with a person being dead, you can probably look us up under mother-daughter literary catastrophe. Or open this book and read my essay, which I’ll turn in when I go back to school.
Review:
I confess, I made the mistake of judging a book by its cover before I began reading The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls by Julie Schumacher. The lovely pool water, the casually tan legs, the cute nail polish and a book. I assumed that I was going off on a journey with a totally light novel.
I was slightly mistaken.
In addition to a certain degree of lightness and humor, Julie Schumacher delivers a novel of surprising depth in The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls.
Narrator Adrienne, alongside classmates CeeCee, Jill, and Wallis have found themselves completing their summer reading assignments in a Mother-Daughter book club. The girls have virtually nothing in common beyond the fact that they’ll all be taking AP English next year as Juniors. The novel is Adrienne’s essay, defining literature analysis terms with each chapter that I myself first learned beginning in my AP English class junior year.
Adrienne draws parallels from the required reading to her own life. A voracious reader, it was therefore easy for me to draw my own parallels from my thoughts to hers. One of my favorite moments is when she says:
“To me, a recently read novel was like a miniature planet: only a few hours earlier I had been breathing its air and living contentedly among its people”*
There are a ton of laugh-out-loud moments found in the interactions of the girls. CeeCee’s attitude, in particular, surprised a laugh from me more than once. Adrienne’s description of some of the other girls and people also had me giggling. Every time she said that Wallis “growled” some dialogue, I couldn’t help but snicker imagining someone growling out a perfectly ordinary phrase.
This isn’t a book about boys. Honestly, it’s not even really a book about friendships because I doubt CeeCee, Jill, Adrienne, and Wallis will ever truly talk to each other again now that the summer and the book club are over. It’s about connecting. Adrienne connects with the other girls, with the literature, with her mom. And I found my eyes welling up with tears over it because the book connected with me.
Overall rating: 4/5. Humor, depth, books, and connectivity. I can’t say I’d ask for much more.
*Note: quote is from a review copy and may have changed
