Book Review ANSWERS IN THE PAGES David Levithan

I found ANSWERS IN THE PAGES by David Levithan on the Libby app. Check for your local library on the app and read great books for free!📚

Thank you also to my Goodreads friend, Karen, for recommending this great book💜

Based on the amount of nuance and genuine empathy I found in this book, I may not have guessed at first that it was written for kids, but it is a middlegrade novel. I decided to listen to the audiobook of this short novel, and this was a perfect form for this book, whose premise winds up introducing significant stakes. Any reader may want to, as I did thanks in part to the audiobook, binge this book and finish it all at once. Also worth noting, the talented cast of narrators brings this book to life.

In this story, a community reacts to one of the books assigned to its middlegrade children, based purely on its final line:

At that moment, Rick knew how deeply he loved Oliver, and Oliver knew how deeply he loved Rick, and the understanding of this moment would lead them to much of the happiness and adventure that came next. 

Already, I was engrossed in a story about a book, a powerful cultural artifact with many moving parts. 

The sentence in question becomes the eye of a social firestorm, but in my opinion, it's something the narrator says shortly after sharing the sentence for the first time that is far more prescient and timely: It would be a good idea for you to stop and figure out how you feel about this sentence. This is the last time you will get to hear it before other people with tell you what they think about it. 

All the townspeople have their own opinions about what the lines in the book mean. So do the children reading it and the teacher who assigned the book to them. The narrator breaks the fourth wall in this place, a powerful (and sometimes terrible, but not here) authorial power, to ask the reader to consider their own thoughts and opinions.

To me, the underlying premise of this story is clear: it encourages the reader to know and understand their own thoughts and actions, to not become swept up in the passions of society around them. It is also about books and how important and powerful they are in teaching individuals to develop this skill-- to sit alone with ideas, think about them, and decide whether or not they make sense in the greater context of their lives. When readers fail to do this simple thing, to think with their own mind about what they read, they not only miss the point of the book they are reading and a book in general, they also lose an opportunity to create something perfectly unique between them and the author of the book-- their own interpretation. 

Oh, and I like turtles too. I'm slow. I go slow when I need to to get things right. I really relate to the main character, Donovan, despite the fact he is in middle school. He is a lovely person, so thoughtful. I think his point of view is a perfect choice for this story-- he considers all the sides with delicacy and quiet empathy, even though he always knows where he stands.

In my opinion, in this age of book banning, high expectations of five-star-ratings, and book bullying for ratings and reviews and reading ideologies, I think everyone should read this book.

Rating: 🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢 / 5 slow turtles

Recommend? Please read this book

Finished: July 1 2023

Format: Audiobook, Libby

Read this book if you like:

👨‍👩‍👦 Middlegrade fiction

👩‍⚖️ Social justice in fiction

🐢 ASD rep

🌈 LGBTQ+ rep

🪢 Meta fiction