Review: Taylor Before and After

‘There aren't just two kinds of people in the world!’ Oh, gosh this couldn't ring more true. This phrase sounds inconsequential but like so many other lines from this story, it resounds with implication.

Taylor Before and After is a novel that delivers exactly what the title proclaims: a look at one young girl's life before and after a life-altering event. The before and after are segmented into seasons that represent promise, Fall or Autumn - the before, and grimness and despair, Winter - the after. Towards the conclusion, Spring makes an appearance but more on that later.

Taylor is a tween starting a new school in a new American state which happens to be the island of Hawaii. Nearly everything is exotic and evocative at first. She is intoxicated by the tropical perfumes of the island, its mesmerizing views and its addictive surfing culture. However not everything that sparkles are diamonds and soon the charms of an island lifestyle decay leaving Taylor feeling entrapped and suffocated by its corrupt undercurrents and the banal atrocities that tourists are too sun-struck to notice.

Her discomfortiture and the slow dismantling of her confidence, is told in a succession of epistolary styled writing entries; a regular free-writing exercise set by her creative languages teacher. Through these journal entries, Taylor develops an internal dialogue with herself that allows us glimpses of her mental health and well-being.

At first both states of being appear severely marred. Weakened, bruised beyond repair. Entries are disjointed and indirect yet each provide a clue to what really lies beneath Taylor's intense pain. We gradually learn more as her entries develop in depth and detail and she begins to purge her grief and frustrations. She dares to share her deepest thoughts and dreams and thus begins to repair, one tearful word at a time. It is interesting to note that Taylor's Autumn / Fall entries, her Before, reflect a voice that is still innocent and girlish, unaffected and cheerful. Winter entries feel more somber and sound as though they are the thoughts of a much older teen, which is fitting as the passage of time describes Taylor's emotional maturing as much as its destruction.

There is as much humor as there is tragedy in this story of loss, gains, betrayals and dealing with grief. For those who've experienced a cataclysmic event like the death of someone close when they were still young and impressionable, this will be a revealing novel. At times confronting, the staccato style of the beginning settles into a need to know the complete story. Englund's references to surfing and thought provoking writing prompts along with intimate interactions with Taylor and the terrible psyche of middle school friendship groups provides enough tension and emotional development to keep pages turning. The ending - Spring - gently draws readers into an ocean of hope. It's just that sometimes, in life, we have to weather a few other seasons before we get there.

An evocative read suited to older reading tweens and middle grade students. Lovers of YA will also appreciate the complex older themes of Taylor's story.

Title: Taylor Before and After
Author: Jennie Englund
Publisher: Pan Macmillan, $29.99 
Publication Date: February 2020
Format: Hardback
ISBN: 9781250171870
For ages: 11 – 15
Type: Middle Fiction Mature Readers

Buy the Book: Pan Macmillan, Boomerang Books, Booktopia


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Goldfish Boy

Image
Twelve-year-old Matthew Corbin is your regular pre-teen boy living in an unspectacular cul-de-sac deep in British suburbia. The major difference between him and the other inhabitants of Chestnut Close however is the state of his red-raw hands and tortured mind and the fact that he barely steps outside his terraced-home second story bedroom. Matthew is afflicted with severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, OCD and can barely function as a result. From his fishbowl vantage point, Matthew keeps track of his neighbours, dutifully recording their every movement, their comings and goings, and their habitual rituals in his notebooks. In this way we are introduced to the residents and their characteristic irks and quirks from the get go in a way that is both intriguing and comical. Matthew’s observations allude to his condition; he is both analytical and detailed in his approach. The orderliness of his notations suggest a mind used to repetition and accuracy, an intense desire to ‘get things r...
Read more

Review: Detention

Image
Tristan Bancks signed my copy of Detention with a note hoping it kept me turning pages . This book lived up to that promise and then some. Packed with page-turning tension and relentless drama, this is one middle grade novel that may cause a few kids to miss their dinner call. Yet despite the raw gritty urgency that suffuses nearly every page and the elevated sense of dread and desperation that keeps your heart in top gear, the pace is never too manic nor too hectic to enjoy the energising mix of edgy excitement and sincere emotion Bancks does so well. Dan is an inner suburban boy living on the outer perimeters of life. He’s classified as trailer park trash because of his permanent residence at the social-economically deprived Midgenba caravan park. It’s a title that comes with an ineradicable smear of hopeless. Deep down though, Dan’s a good kid, a caring kid. The type of kid who’ll risk his own face to save a vicious dying dog, which he does one day after finding Rosco tied ...
Read more

I've got a dream

Image
Almost a decade of moons ago, I made a serendipitous discovery that forever altered the spin of my world. Falling pregnant after so many years of waiting and yearning was nothing short of miraculous (for me) and a life event definitely worth waxing lyrical about. But did I? Sadly, not as much I as wanted to. There are those who find it hard to exist without sharing the contents of their dinner plates with the rest of  the world, then there are others who worry that a beautifully executed birthday cake photo shared on social media will somehow demean the starving populations of the world. I oscillate between the two but tend towards the latter, always fretting over how others will take good news in light of their own current situations and struggles, thus resorting to a severe downplaying of my own good fortune. The pregnancy of my first child should have been a joyous occasion - it was a joyous pregnancy after all - but I was acutely conscious at the time of another family me...
Read more