This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki: #tbt review

(Finished April 22, 2015)

I don't often sit down and take in a whole book, even a short one, in one sitting anymore, but this was so absorbing I did just that. The characters and situations are very imperfect and very real. There's so much tension between things everlastingly staying always the same whether you want them to or not, and things inexorably changing whether you want them to or not—and the girls are right at that cusp of becoming teenagers, and developing (internally, externally) unevenly, as kids do—and it's just a chapter in their lives, just this one summer—

We see coming-of-age books about boys all the time. And sexy ones about girls. This book is just real. In some ways it's more of a window than a mirror--I didn't have the kind of childhood where staying at a summer cottage was a thing--but I saw myself, too, in the push and pull between wanting to stay a child and being impatient with the whole thing and wanting to just grow up already. 

And there's the whole thing where your parents become suddenly human and the way their human imperfections impact your life becomes—not exactly a thing you question, but at least you begin to see it. It's still the water you swim in every day, but you're getting close to the point in your life where you will be breaching the surface tension. 

And there's the other thing where your childhood friendships, based on nothing more than proximity and age and yet seeming as permanent as the landscape around you, become something that may or may not last through the next argument or your family's next living situation. Just because someone's proximity has made them almost part of who you are doesn't mean that the person they're growing up to be won't be a stranger to you. And that feels so, so strange when you realize it.

I guess what I mean is, read this.