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Summary: A coming-of-age book for the nineties with brains and soul!
Review: Looking for a smart, sensitive portrayal of teenagers growing up in the late nineties? Hard Love is the book for you. Jaded junior high and high school students, young college students and parents alike will be amazed at Wittlinger's perceptive, hard-hitting, complex young adult novel. As a graduate student, I expected to feel mildly engaged with Hard Love; but to my surprise, I became deeply involved with this work. The first-person narrative of the main character, a high school junior named John, held my attention from the somewhat inauspicious beginning. John is a young man who doesn't know if he's straight, gay, angry, happy, bored, or abandoned. His mother hasn't touched him at all since his father walked out on them years before, and his father is a wealthy playboy who gives John freedom--freedom to be ignored, freedom to turn into a block of ice. At first, John infuriated me. I wanted him to talk, to stop whining, to tell his parents what was really going on. He comes across as a loner, a loser of a kid who's intelligent enough but keeps the world at a huge distance. Luckily, John's world is blown open when he meets Marisol, who produces her own 'zine and calls herself a "Puerto Rican Cuban Yankee lesbian." I delighted in watching Wittlinger develop John's character from this point on as he discovers worlds of creativity, love, and strength. John's young, raw voice becomes a focal point for the labyrinth of teenage emotional life. By the conclusion, my emotions were so completely bound up with John's that I cried with both pain and joy at the resolutions--and non-resolutions--of the novel. The teenagers in Hard Love are complex. Alienated, motivated, creative, needy, dependent, raw, and discovering their place in a human community, they write 'zines, create music, run away from problems, face parental failings, and in general deal with the painful world in various original and authentic ways. In creating John and Marisol, Wittlinger combines skill, knowledge, and sensitivity. Added bonuses are references to Ani DiFranco and Bob Franke, plus great tips on the world of 'zines and lyrical descriptions of the Boston and Cape Cod areas. This 26-year-old found Hard Love an emotionally and intellectually satisfying, even fulfilling read. I'd suggest you buy it now!
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Summary: This Book was AWSOME!!!
Review: I LOVED this book!! Even Though it dealed with homosexuality, Which I'm not a huge fan of,the way this book was written made up for it. It's about Two magazine writers who meet and become really close. I love that in their zines they can write about personal stuff. Some of the stuff they wrote were so deep and it definetly got me hooked. This book is so detailed that it seems like you know the Characters personally and it's like you're watching everything that's happenig. I recomend this book for everyone!!
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Summary: Same story, different angle: great book!
Review: This is a story done by many in the new "genre" of straight kids who are in love with homosexual kids. The intriguing thing about this one, though, is that it's told from the point of view of John, the straight kid. Marisol, a lesbian, is pulled off wonderfully, being a very strong independent type. She lets no one tell her what to do, and is very stable.
The only bad thing about this book is the stereotypical gay guy that Marisol is friends with. The duo are, in theirselves, an over-done duo.
I really like the fact that Marisol does not "decide" she is no longer gay just because John likes her; it gives the story a lot more reality.
The majority seems almost like it was taken from the life of someone - the conflict is very real. A very good book, all in all.
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Summary: Nails a lot of growing up
Review: First, let me say I'm almost 40 -- I picked this up because I saw that my 14-year-old daughter was hooked on this book and was just curious what she was into these days. I finished it in a couple hours.
I won't go into the plot summary as it's been thoroughly covered here already. The writing (and this book is ALL about writing) is excellent. How Wittlinger gets right into the head of an angry, alienated teenage male (something I remember being, and not fondly) is astonishing. The character of John unleashes some of the most scathing blasts of brutal honesty (read the letters to his parents!) while lying (sort of) about so much else to the one person who is so important to his world. He is so conflicted, and Wittlinger just nails the character.
[...]But that's missing the point -- this novel is only marginally about gay/lesbian issues.
It's about the difference between honesty and lying (both to yourself as well as those who love you, or in the case of the parents, those who are supposed to love you). It's also about what it means to be touched by someone -- the physical touching referred to often in the book is really about breaking through the defensive barriers that alienated teens and their damaged parents are both victims of. It's about writing as a tool for self-discovery and healing, or "the magic words" as they are referred to by the characters in the book. And ultimately, it's about how gut-wrenching it can be to get really close to somebody and realize how much pain can be involved with that.
I'm a little sad that this is classified as "young adult" fiction in that a lot of adults who appreciate great writing and three-dimensional characters probably won't read it. And truth be told, there are probably some teens who just won't understand what makes this such a great read. But for those teens who do get it and the adults lucky enough to stumble on this little gem of a book, it is well worth the effort.
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Summary: Soul Capturer
Review: This is the 2nd Ellen Wittlinger book I have read, and I am hooked. This book is well-written and intriguing from the very start. I FELT what the characters were to be feeling. I know people who have dealt with the issues in this book and I feel like Ellen Wittlinger CAPTURED the spirit of those souls.
My eyes were welled up with tears at the end of this book, and I am not emotional about most items that I read. I felt like I was experiencing the novel as it transpired. The characters are very well-spoken and believable, so I lost myself in this novel.
Ellen Wittlinger is a treasure in Young Adult Literature. Very nicely done!
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Summary: A heart-wrenching necessity to life as a reader
Review: Wittlinger tore at my heart to get at the pain and truth underneath. Her facility and play with humorous language floored me unendingly - I literally kept a list of the pages where her turn of phrases were particularly hilarious. I cannot believe I'd gone so long without reading this book and I wish I had it when I was going through similar issues in my own late teens (except I was in Marisol's shoes). The literary world as a whole should be thankful that this book exists.
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Summary: A Highschooler's Thoughts
Review: I thought this was a wonderful book because it`s a classic boy meets girl, boy falls for girl kind of thing, but in this book he falls for a lesbian. That part isn't so classic. John, the guy, meets Marisol, the lesbian, through her writing. John thinks her writing is stupendous and falls for her instantly even though he hasn`t even meet her. I think it would be a great way to meet someone, through a magazine article that they wrote and you enjoyed it. They meet at a bookstore called The Boston Tower Records and he falls in love with her. I have some friends that think I am obsessed with a guy, even though he moved away, and I think Gio began obsessing over Marisol. They became fast friends and they had a hard love. I think it is hard for someone to fall in love with someone who is not straight because they won't have the same feelings as you would. They can't love you the same because they don't feel that way about you and that is a harsh reality. I think it would be awkward to love a gay person because if they found out, they might not want to be your friend anymore because you can't force them to be straight just for you and they may think of you as an outsider. I thing Gio found that out when he tried to kiss her at the Junior Prom that he took her to and she began to yell at him she thought she could trust him, and he knew that she didn't like him that way. In the end, this was an excellent book because it gives you the harsh reality of falling for someone who doesn't feel the same way you do. It also gives you the point of view that you would normally not get of the harsh reality of what it's like to be gay and have a straight person fall for you.
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Summary: Harper's Monthly Article re YA Novels
Review: I read this novel while it was still in development by the author, and thought she might like to know that there is a very flattering reference to it in an article on young adult novels in the September 2004 issue of Harper's Monthly.
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Summary: Stereotypes
Review: This book started off pretty good, but then fell into some major stereotyping. I'm straight, but I have some friends who are gay, and I laughed out loud at some of the boxes the gay characters in this book were put into, and the ones the straight characters were kept out of. Like the Ani Difranco thing... one of my particularly awesome, sensitive guy friends who is straight loves her music and included some on a mixed CD he made for Perks of Being a Wallflower, a book you should run out and read RIGHT NOW. The idea of starting a zine is pretty intriguing, I must admit, and I was definately interested his relationships with his mother, father, and soon-to-be stepfather, which is why I gave this 3 stars. And about that Perks of Being a Wallflower thing... really, go read it, because it is 500 times better than this book.
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Summary: Verry good. Best I've read in a while.
Review: First off, I loved this book. As I'm fifteen, bisexual, and I live in Nebraska, I can totally relate to Marisol.
John Galardi's mother hasn't touched him since this parent's divorce. Or rather, she can't stand to touch him. And now his mother is getting married again. On the weekends he goes to his fathers house, which is never good, because John and his father hardly ever get along.
So he expresses himself through his zine, Bananafish. With articles like 'Memoirs from Hell,' it's obvious that John's life isn't so great. Then he meets Marisol. He's read Marisol's zine, Escape Velocity, before, and he states that he needs to meet her. So he waits at the Boston Tower Records.
Then John falls in love with her. Only one problem. Marisol's a lesbian.
I don't want to spoil the story for you, so I'll just stop there, but I'd highly recommend you to pick up a copy of this book. Especially if you've ever felt the need to escape.
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