crabbygirl reviewed Love Is the Higher Law by David Levithan
Review of 'Love Is the Higher Law' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
ah, the things you can do with a young adult novel... like read it within 12 hours :)
(of course, it helped that i had a chunk of uninterrupted reading time)
it's set in NY, on sept 11, and follows 2 high school kids & 1 college kid through the days, weeks, and months after 9/11. it had a genuine immediacy of highschool. to think i'd forgotten how important a mixed tape could be. one character in particular saw most of life thru the prism of lyrics & music and i could see how this same author wrote 'nick and nora's ultimate playlist'
personally, i like to read fiction that uses real events / places as the setting - 'cellist of sarajevo', 'nightbird call', etc. - you end up learning something. so i picked up the book (knowing the plot) thinking it might be a good segway for my children …
ah, the things you can do with a young adult novel... like read it within 12 hours :)
(of course, it helped that i had a chunk of uninterrupted reading time)
it's set in NY, on sept 11, and follows 2 high school kids & 1 college kid through the days, weeks, and months after 9/11. it had a genuine immediacy of highschool. to think i'd forgotten how important a mixed tape could be. one character in particular saw most of life thru the prism of lyrics & music and i could see how this same author wrote 'nick and nora's ultimate playlist'
personally, i like to read fiction that uses real events / places as the setting - 'cellist of sarajevo', 'nightbird call', etc. - you end up learning something. so i picked up the book (knowing the plot) thinking it might be a good segway for my children when we hit modern history. afterall, they know very little of the real-time events since they were so young. (heck, i didn't even experience it as a realtime event - we were travelling to a london children's museum with big bird & friends singing the whole way there. it was well past 6pm before i heard the news from a friend)
it won't work as an intro to 9/11. it's pretty much expected that everyone lived through the confusion and fear and mass movements. but it could work on teens who've been overexposed to the images of the towers burning and falling. fiction does that so well. puts you right there. and the teen characters take 3 totally different reactions. so i'll keep this title in my back pocket, but won't take it out for at least another few years