Thank you to Netgalley and University of Minnesota Press for sharing an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
After three years of high school, Margaret still isn’t any closer to what she wants: to sing and dance on Broadway, to be a model like Twiggy, to be madly in love with someone other than Paul McCartney. It’s not much to ask, but with her friends Grace and Isabelle she’s willing to adjust her goals for the summer to a job, a car, and a boyfriend. When Grace gets a job downtown at the Emerald Cafe, where Teddy, a dreamy college kid, tends the meat buffet, it looks like she, at least, is almost halfway there—until Teddy asks for Margaret’s phone number. “Normal” might not be all it’s cracked up to be (high school graduation, marriage, and housewifery, really?), but as Teddy complicates the girls’ friendship, it slowly becomes apparent that “normal” might mean something different, and infinitely trickier, to him. As the old friends, with adulthood looming, navigate the newly confusing territory of love and sexuality and identity, everything they thought they knew is suddenly, frighteningly thrown into question—and they discover that between the dream of stardom and the certainty of housekeeping there’s a vast unsuspected world of peril and possibility. With all the tenderness, heartache, and humor of her earlier novels about Margaret, Grace, and Isabelle, in Whatever Normal Is Jane St. Anthony takes the friends, and her readers, to a place beyond normal—to a future as satisfying as it is promising. I'm not sure I got what I expected from Whatever Normal Is. My expectations were: a book filled with friendship, family, and a little bit of romance. How those expectations were included in the book left some things to be desired. First, the characters. Each more irritating and one-dimensional than the last. Margaret's desires to model? Her hopes and dreams? Not really mentioned past the synopsis. I found her to be immature and mildly selfish instead. Much of the tension stems from Margaret's agony over telling her best friend that the boy the friend likes called Margaret instead. The best friends are equally flat, to the point where I, a person who usually doesn't like side characters, was disappointed. Give me female friendships!! Give me well-rounded characters!! Give me dynamic friendships!! I didn't get those things. The plot. Here's where I don't quite know what to say. I appreciated how slice-of-life the story was. Most things that happened to Margaret were believable for the average high school junior. Time with siblings, fights with friends, a little bit of romance. A lot of bones I have to pick with realistic fiction are about the realism. "Is this *actually* likely to happen? In the life of a *real* teen?" and whatnot. But then this wonderful normality started to turn into mundanity. At some point, slice of life has to be interesting. I have to be invested in the lives of the characters, and I just wasn't feeling it. Lastly, we need to talk about the big twist. I didn't like it. I won't spoil anything (honestly, you could probably guess it, but still), but I don't think the book was prepared to dive into the consequences of this reveal beyond your basic "have compassion, be kind to other people and their lives" and that really disappointed me. Give me the learning, and the character development, and the sensitivity! I beg of you! Give it to me! All in all, Whatever Normal Is gets 3 stars from me. Borrow it from your local library. It's a short read, and probably worth at least one try.
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The BaronessHey, I'm Shreya! I love to read, write, travel, and drink tea. Disclosure: I am an affiliate of bookshop.org and I will earn a small commission if you click the above link and make a purchase.
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