Guest Review: The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls – Julie Schumaker

The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls by Julie Schumaker
Series:
Release Date:  May 8, 2012
Publisher:   Random House Children’s Books
Page Count:  240
Source:  NetGalley
Buy the book at: Amazon 

I’m Adrienne Haus, survivor of a mother-daughter book club. Most of us didn’t want to join. My mother signed me up because I was stuck at home all summer, with my knee in a brace. CeeCee’s parents forced her to join after cancelling her Paris trip because she bashed up their car. The members of “The Unbearable Book Club,” CeeCee, Jill, Wallis, and I, were all going into eleventh grade A.P. English. But we weren’t friends. We were literary prisoners, sweating, reading classics, and hanging out at the pool. If you want to find out how membership in a book club can end up with a person being dead, you can probably look us up under mother-daughter literary catastrophe. Or open this book and read my essay, which I’ll turn in when I go back to school.

 Adrienne Haus was supposed to have the summer vacation of her life with her best friend Liz on a canoe trip to Canada.  She hoped to return home to West New Hope, Delaware a new person,  “”fit and decisive, like Ernest Shackleton or Admiral Peary.””  Instead, she fractured her kneecap and is stuck in her hometown the whole summer, in a knee brace, without a summer job and her best friend.  Her well meaning but eclectic mother, while in a yoga class with other moms from the area, decides to enroll them in a mother-daughter book club with a motley crew: the popular Cee Cee, mysteriousWallis, and over-achiever Jill and their mothers.  The girl’s feelings towards each other, grow predictably from indifference to genuine friendship while reading the classics Frankenstein, The Left Hand of Darkness, The House on Mango Street and Awakening.  According to CeeCee though, “”The books don’t matter: it’s what we find out about each other.””

The unlikely pair of Cee Cee and Adrienne become the closest first, as Cee Cee encourages the rebellious side of good girl Adrienne to surface. Adrienne’s teenage identity crisis is in full swing and her relationship with her mom is challenging because of it.  Although there isn’t a lot of action, the story moves at a good pace and I was actually surprised by the ending, despite it being predicted on the first pages of the book. 

The novel is set with the pretext of being a school essay for the AP english class all the girls are taking in the fall.  That format could have been disjointed and confusing but I found it blended into the story well and added some originality to the text.  The writing has humor and sweetness and many references to some of my personal favorite children’s and young adult books like The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, A Wrinkle in Time and plenty of others.  Particularly cute to me were the Library of Congress subject headings Adrienne assigned to herself (“Bored fifteen-year-old Delawareans—”)

Overall, I enjoyed the light story and relationship between the girls and their mothers as well as the parallels drawn between the books they read and their own lives.  I did find the character development of both Cee Cee and Wallis to be a bit incomplete and one dimensional but nevertheless, the story held my interest the entire way through and I think it would be enjoyable read for fans of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and other similar reads.

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