While helping me with a list of books to suggest for a young man at work my friend & the best children's department lead ever Rachel suggested this one and said it was her favorite book. I immediately had to know why so here we are...and I have to say not since I first read Jhumpa Lahiri have I ever felt like words had a taste and I was feasting....Jandy Nelson gives voice to Jude and Noah and NoahandJude in such a beautiful way, so painful and vivid and heartbreaking and amazing...lines like "he laughs a laugh so happy it blasts about a billion balloons into the air" and "I feel relaxed now, I mean supernaturally relaxed, like I'm left-out butter." and "the colors start flooding into me, not through my eyes but right through my skin, replacing blood and bone, muscle and sinew, until I am redorangebluegreenpurpleyellowredorangebluegreenpurpleyellow." And the portrait titles scattered throughout are so vivid and sometimes heartbreaking, "Boy Blows Into Dust" and "Boy in a Blender"
This is a story of heartbreak and healing, loss and discovery, love and first love and first times (which aren't always connected) and finding out who you are and what you want to be and all the joy and pain that come with that. It is coming of age, coming undone, and being put back together, as Jude calls it, "remake the world"
This is now among my all time favorite books ever!!! It will be suggested to every reader I come in contact with. I haven't been this tempted to start a book over the moment I was done in I don't know how long.....
(Finished Aug. 13, 2019)
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