A Quiet Kind of Thunder

-

A Quiet Kind of Thunder by Sara Barnard (390 pages)
Overview: Steffi has struggled with selective mutism for almost as long as she can remember. It stems from her extreme social anxiety which she's recently started medication to combat. She has to prove to her parents this year that she can handle herself well enough to go to University and send in applications the following year. Then she meets Rhys on her first day at school without her best friend, Tem. Rhys is deaf and since Steffi knows BSL (British Sign Language), they make the perfect match. As they get to know each other better, Steffi starts to test the boundaries that she and her world have made. Overall: 4.5

 Characters: 5 Steffi and Rhys are awesome. They have their conflicts and miscommunications, but they really are united by a language that not many around them share, and they use that to grow. Their honesty in the way they care for one another is refreshing. Though they both have complications with their respective challenges, they do well at overcoming them both separately and together.
Another great element of this books is Steffi's parents. After they divorced, both of her parent's remarried, and it was cool to see the dynamic of all four of them being almost equally involved in her life. Like Rhys, everyone has their faltering moments, but, overall, Steffi is given a great, supportive environment.

Plot: 4 I loved getting to see the romance come to life between Rhys and Steffi that went along with Steffi slowly improving, but, luckily, Steffi's improvements are never treated as a miracle turn of events. The honest conversations about Steffi's medications and the positive portrayal of therapy as a tool to combat her social anxiety was nice to see.
My only negative comment is that the book does drag on a bit. While every scene is fun, I felt that the book could have been shorter, but there was never a moment I wanted to stop reading.

Writing: 5 It's easy to see how much care Barnard put into the story. She's careful in her portrayals, and it makes the story better for it. While I can't speak to this as an own voices reviewer, it seems like she was sensitive in her portrayal and painted a quality picture of both Steffi and Rhys and their differences. It's great to see a book that tackles mental illness and its lesser acknowledged possible side effects like Steffi's mutism along with physical disability like deafness.

Books Like This...
Not If I See You First: Review Here
Radio Silence: Review Here
Unbroken:Review Here

Links of Interest:
Field Guide to the North American Teenager: Review Here
The Summer of Jordi Perez: Review Here
The Me I Meant to Be: Review Here
Books In Schools: Here

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

You'd Be Home By Now by Kathleen Glasgow: YA Book Review

-
Image
  You'd Be Home By Now  by Kathleen Glasgow  I'm very thankful to the publisher for providing me with this ARC to share my honest thoughts on this book with all of you. Overview: Emory has always been the good one. The nice one. The easy one. The invisible one. Her older sister, Maddie, is gorgeous and talented. Her older brother, Joey, is struggling with addiction issues, and her parents saddle Emory with the responsibility of being his forever babysitter. No one thinks about Emory- ever. Which leads her to pick up a habit of stealing and collecting small things and hooking up with the high school baseball star next door to feel seen and important. While Joey is stuck on the rollercoaster of his addiction, his family is right there behind him, and as Emory struggles to keep Joey stable, she's also left to contend with her own precariously okay life. Overall: 5+ Characters: 5 Emory is maybe the most universally relatable teen character in YA. She feels unheard and unseen by
Read more

The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir: Short Story Collection Review

-
Image
The Woman Destroyed  by Simone de Beauvoir  Overview: The book was first published in 1967, so it's by far the oldest book I've read by choice since I read Jane Austen in middle school. Classics assigned in grade school largely left a bad taste in my mouth, and I've never figured out how to decipher which ones actually deserve to stand the test of time. (If you'd like to give me more recommendations, I liked Rebecca , Pride and Prejudice , and Frankenstein  most). I have a weird relationship with things made before the '90s unless they're from the 1800s because I have no real context for what I think they'll sound like or feel like. A serious failure of the education system is that every history class I've ever taken stopped around 1900 and never covered any recent history besides random, isolated events. Since The Woman Destroyed  has suddenly become trendy amongst the lit fic online communities, I figured I'd hop on the bandwagon and give it a try.
Read more

Happy Place by Emily Henry: romance review

-
Image
Happy Place  by Emily Henry Overview: Harriet found her friend group for life in college. They might as well be her family. They've grown together through graduation and law school and medical school and one member leaving to go to South America to learn organic farming because they always come back together to spend a week in Maine every year at one friend's family summer house. Now, as they confront true adulthood and the changes that come with it, they have one more summer together before the house is sold to set the course of the future of their bonds. Overall: 4 Do I think this is an incredible romance? Maybe not. But it is a great book.  Characters: 4 There's a lot of characters in this book. The core friend group is six people, plus we get a closer look at both Harriet and her ex-fiancé Wyn's families. They're all well developed and have good dimension despite there being so many characters involved.  Harriet is at a crisis point in her life. She's in the
Read more