Transformative Connections

A couple of weeks ago, I was wandering around the bookstore looking for Alex Sanchez's Rainbow Road. (I've found YA LGBTQ fiction to be a reliable source of solace, and needed just that.) Not having any luck, I picked up Julie Anne Peters' Define "Normal" and Kris Radish's Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral instead.

I read through Define "Normal" in a couple of days. (I think out of the Peters' novels I've read--Far From Xanadu, Luna, Keeping You a Secret, and now Define "Normal"--Keeping You a Secret is still my favorite.)

Define "Normal" is the story of two eighth grade girls, Jasmine "Jazz" Luther and Antonia "Tone" Dillon, who meet through a peer counseling program. The novel begins in such a way that positions Antonia as Jazz's peer counselor, but by its end, Jazz is revealed to have been paired with Antonia to be her peer counselor. Really, the girls become confidants and friends to one another in such a way that who the counselor and who the client is becomes insignificant in the end.

Jazz and Tone, respectively, struggle to keep up appearances while other parts of their lives pull them in other directions. Jazz is the "punk" who is a classical music pianist and dreams of studying music in college, and Antonia is the math club nerd working desperately to hold her family together as her mother suffers from severe depression. They both manage to break through each other's walls, and find a place where they let others break through their walls. Antonia's story was one that was especially tough to get through at times.

What I liked best about the book is that the connection these girls make, and the absolutely transformative effect of that connection left me with a sense of hope--that perhaps others would break through my walls, that perhaps I would let others in, and potentially experience such a transformative connection.

Just yesterday, I finished Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral. It was an impulse buy that caught my eye because as I randomly flipped through it at the bookstore, I read that one of the characters was a lesbian. The premise of the novel is that Annie Freeman's last request after her death is that a small group of close friends assemble into a traveling funeral and serving as pall bearers to her cremated ashes, visiting important places from her life and spreading her ashes. Needless to say, there's lots of reminiscing, grieving, crying, but most of all a re-evaluation of the lives these women are living.

As it turns out, given the end of my semester and the loss I've been feeling associated with it, Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral came into my life right when I might have needed it most. It was a truly touching read that spoke to the power of friendship, the strength of a community of women, and the preciousness of life.

[Believe] in the magic of life, the power of hope, the cosmic sanity of chance and change, and the unmistakable power of love (297)

Sometimes you just don't know until you do it, try it or, I suppose, be it (312)

Life does not stop or wait even if you do. Pause if you must, the women agree, but then catch up fast, run with the wind, slide down the hill tumbling headfirst so that you can fall into the hands of now--today, everyday, every minute, every second (319)

Damn, I hope connections like these don't only exist in books!