Method Book

This was the newest installment in my "reread available juvy lit to survive the stress of finals" series. Initially, I was disappointed. Lasky varies her sentence structures so rarely that I found myself lulled practically to sleep at times, and I'm not sure how well the direct address worked outside her target age group. (Whether it works within her target age group I can no longer speak to.) That said, the plot -- about growing up an avid reader in a family of newly fundamentalist Christians who aspire to ban most books -- did ultimately become engrossing enough to win me over. I was a little disappointed with the terms of the ending; I wonder if more autonomy would have been outside the realism of Harper's character, or just a nice move toward an even stronger female protagonist. Also, I thought the constant use of references to other books became a little forced, although the portrayal of relationships to *authors* struck me as touching and well done. But overall, this is a semi-engrossing read, worth the minimal amount of time it takes to finish.