CW: Sexual assault of teen. child soldiers

3.5 Stars ( )

Real Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: i am the girl manny loves. the girl who writes our story in the book of flying. i am alice.

Alice is fifteen, with hair as red as fire and skin as pale as bone. Something inside Alice is broken: she remembers words, but struggles to speak them. Still, Alice knows that words are for sharing, so she pins them to posters in tucked-away places: railway waiting rooms, fish-and-chips shops, quiet corners. Manny is sixteen, with a scar from shoulder to elbow. Something inside Manny is broken, too: he once was a child soldier, forced to do terrible, violent things. But in a new land with people who care for him, Manny explores the small town on foot. And in his pocket, he carries a poem he scooped up, a poem whose words he knows by heart. The relationship between Alice and Manny will be the beginning of love and healing. And for these two young souls, perhaps, that will be good enough.

Beautiful, lyrical prose, told in two voices, lifts up a poignant story of two traumatized teens who find each other in a small riverside town.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: The end of 2015 was a time that I, personally, was healing from some awful emotional and psychic wounds. At that moment, I wasn't really up to reading adult-level books. I thought that, since they're aimed at people of (say) twelve or thirteen, YA books would be about perfect for me. Not too rough, not too simplistic.

You idiot, I want to find my younger, more naïve self and shout at him.

This is a charming story of young love, of the viperous depredations of haters inculcated in a sense of their own superiority and imperviousness to blame, of the astounding prices we exact from those too weak to resist. They're all done up in ribbons of florid language in this book, and the use of typographical tomfoolery...Alice's narration is without capitals, while Manny's is in a blocky sans-serif type and in very English-as-a-second-language words...is pervasive. In fact it sort of defines the ethos and the aesthetic of the story. Which explains the missing stars.

Yes, it will appeal to the target audience. No, it did nothing but detract from the touching story being told. The stars stay gone.

Small-town stardom and the general veneration in US culture for sports stars at all levels is under very effective attack in this story. Manny is a child soldier being gentled into mainstream society by some very good souls. His father figure, Bull, is a former high-school sports phenom. It's natural that Manny would map his own efforts onto Bull's pattern. That he is good at it is the source of his worst, most believable crisis.

Alice is, it's fair to say, a social outcast from a family of them. She's neurodivergent, she's a poet, she's all sorts of things people feel skittish about. She has Bear, a medical-assistance dog, which frankly was something I'd been largely unaware of the existence of for people like Alice. So it was natural and inescapable that their outsiderness calls each to the other. There really is no way to argue that it would ever be otherwise, either in reality or in fiction. Alice's father is in prison, her mother ran the hell away from the troubles, and her brother Joey has designs on a girl above his station. That girl's brother, the sports star, decides he'll make absolutely sure he drives a spike into these designs and uses Manny and Alice as his sledgehammer.

Stuff gets ugly. Stuff happens that inevitably will happen in every life. And all of it in the silly-buggers typography that caused me, too many times to count, to go back and forth and back and forth to figure out if we're still in the same sentence because NO CAPS = NO BREAKS!

Well, anyway, that's the old man speaking. And you'll notice that I finished the book, so the story obviously offered me something I wanted enough to keep laboriously decoding the damn thing.

That it did. Alice and Manny. Joey and Tilda. Bull and Louisa. People doing more than the minimum, for no reason other than it's the right thing to do. People reaching into each other's dark places and standing with the whole person not just the pretty, easy bits.

It's a well-made story that takes us on a realistic enough journey through a culture in the throes of challenge and change. So much for a simple, easy-to-process little story, eh what? ( )

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thoughts and opinions are my own. Also, the quote I used may have changed or been altered in some way, but I am quoting from what I received.

Bahh bahh black sheep (that's me)... I struggled with this after two pages, but I kept going until I got to Manny's perspective. I know a lot of people have liked this, and they say the story is beautiful, but I found it really hard to follow the writing. I understand that Alice has brain damage, and I appreciate the authenticity the author was going for, but it didn't work for me. There are no capital letters when Alice is speaking, she makes up her own words when something doesn't make sense, and she switches from sentences to poetry quite often. It was hard for me to follow, so I felt like I was missing important aspects of the story.

I thought Manny's perspective would have been easier to read from, but one of the first things he says is, "It was a girl. Her hair was very long. Down to her waist it was. That is how I knew that person was a girl," and I was finished. I know the synopsis mentions him being broken, too, so I guess it makes sense on some level, but it was a struggle for me.

I really wanted to like this, so I hate that it wasn't a good fit. However, if the formatting doesn't bother you, definitely give it a shot. I can honestly say that the voice is original, and Alice brings a unique perspective to the story.


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I started this book and then almost put it down...I felt like Alice had been victimized enough, or it felt like conceit of a traumatized, speechless, terribly poor girl was somehow exploitive. I kept going and really fell into the book and cared much for the two main characters. It's a lovely sad book, with a hopeful ending.There's a lot of living packed into these short book. Well worth the read!!

Having experienced a traumatic event and crushing head blows when she was 12, Alice has trouble expressing herself verbally, and instead writes poems. She feels stuck at age 12 to the outside world, but inside she is longing to prove to the world that she is more than just what happened to her. Manny, a former child soldier from Sierra Leone, runs to escape the brutalities of his past. He’s trying to adjust to his new family and his new life, but he feels just as broken as Alice. When he finds one of her poems, her words speak to him, and the two forge a connection in spite of their differences and in spite of those who want to beat them down and keep them apart.

This book and the characters will haunt you long after you finish the last page. Alice’s words are insightful and revealing in their simplistic beauty. The protective love that envelopes Alice, her brother Joey, their grandmother and grandfather, and their dog Bear, is enviable, and when Alice’s full story is revealed, readers feel that same sense of protection and love toward all of them. The ending will leave you breathless, but filled with hope that love and courage can heal all.

Highly recommended for gr. 9-12. ( )