I couldn’t decide if I really wanted to keep reading, or give up due to boredom. I stuck it out and can only say it was definitely not worth it.

Read the rest of my review on this really boring book at: http://shouldireaditornot.wordpress.com/2012/11/02/emilys-dress-kathryn-burak/ ( )

I had the pleasure of hearing the author read from the book and look forward to talking with her some more at our book group tomorrow.

I very much enjoyed the voice of the protagonist, Claire, who's repeating her senior year of high school in a new town (Amherst, hometown of Emily Dickinson) after a disastrous senior year in Rhode Island, where she was a person of interest in the disappearance of her friend Richy. She's suffered another great loss earlier in her life, and these losses alienate her from run-of-the-mill high school life, which she observes with dark humor:

[The English teacher's] suit, shirt, skin, and beard converge into the same shade of neutral. Only the textures distinguish clothing from person. It's easy to dwell on this coincidence of color in a classroom that's full of postlunch students, where the boys are sprawled out as if they are required to take up as much room as possible, like downed rain-forest trees, where the girls retract their elbows as you pass by. Like some rain-forest insects with a similar nature, even the most benign contact with them is taboo.

Claire makes two friends, cheerful Tess, who's in her class, and Sam Tate, an Amherst college student who's briefly a student teacher in Claire's English class. The relationship with Tess felt just right: Claire's hesitance, desire not to ruin things, and delight in Tess's friendship--plus, the two of them have a fun game they play based on the song "Human or Dancer." I don't know how accessible this reference will be for readers a decade from now, but right now it was perfect.

The relationship with Tate I had more trouble with, but I got to liking Tate more when he started being a little sharp with Claire, reminding her that she wasn't necessarily the only person in the world with an unhappy backstory.

I also very much enjoyed Claire's feelings about and memories of her mother. It would have been very easy for these to have gone all in one direction or all in another, but instead they're nuanced and rich and very moving. Claire's feelings about her father, too, are complicated in a very real way that I found believable and touching.

I wasn't so happy with the way Richy's disappearance was resolved. His body is found, and he's assumed to be a suicide, but actually, as Claire suspects, it's a murder--and then, in what for me was an uncomfortable excursion away from the emotional focus of the book, Claire and Tate engage in some sleuthing and reveal the murderer. For me, the introduction of a cold-blooded killer was too much of a police-procedural move. I can understand, from a story-construction point of view, why it would be awkward to have it be that Richy truly did commit suicide. Claire has already had one suicide in her life. But why not make it be that Richy died in an accident? The random misfortune of an accident--having to deal with that--would have felt, for me, more in keeping with the tone of the book.

But then again, maybe I'm wrong. Claire's history is pretty dramatic; maybe she needed to have a murder victim in her past--she'd probably tell me so herself, with a half-smile. ( )

I had the pleasure of hearing the author read from the book and look forward to talking with her some more at our book group tomorrow.

I very much enjoyed the voice of the protagonist, Claire, who's repeating her senior year of high school in a new town (Amherst, hometown of Emily Dickinson) after a disastrous senior year in Rhode Island, where she was a person of interest in the disappearance of her friend Richy. She's suffered another great loss earlier in her life, and these losses alienate her from run-of-the-mill high school life, which she observes with dark humor:

[The English teacher's] suit, shirt, skin, and beard converge into the same shade of neutral. Only the textures distinguish clothing from person. It's easy to dwell on this coincidence of color in a classroom that's full of postlunch students, where the boys are sprawled out as if they are required to take up as much room as possible, like downed rain-forest trees, where the girls retract their elbows as you pass by. Like some rain-forest insects with a similar nature, even the most benign contact with them is taboo.

Claire makes two friends, cheerful Tess, who's in her class, and Sam Tate, an Amherst college student who's briefly a student teacher in Claire's English class. The relationship with Tess felt just right: Claire's hesitance, desire not to ruin things, and delight in Tess's friendship--plus, the two of them have a fun game they play based on the song "Human or Dancer." I don't know how accessible this reference will be for readers a decade from now, but right now it was perfect.

The relationship with Tate I had more trouble with, but I got to liking Tate more when he started being a little sharp with Claire, reminding her that she wasn't necessarily the only person in the world with an unhappy backstory.

I also very much enjoyed Claire's feelings about and memories of her mother. It would have been very easy for these to have gone all in one direction or all in another, but instead they're nuanced and rich and very moving. Claire's feelings about her father, too, are complicated in a very real way that I found believable and touching.

I wasn't so happy with the way Richy's disappearance was resolved. His body is found, and he's assumed to be a suicide, but actually, as Claire suspects, it's a murder--and then, in what for me was an uncomfortable excursion away from the emotional focus of the book, Claire and Tate engage in some sleuthing and reveal the murderer. For me, the introduction of a cold-blooded killer was too much of a police-procedural move. I can understand, from a story-construction point of view, why it would be awkward to have it be that Richy truly did commit suicide. Claire has already had one suicide in her life. But why not make it be that Richy died in an accident? The random misfortune of an accident--having to deal with that--would have felt, for me, more in keeping with the tone of the book.

But then again, maybe I'm wrong. Claire's history is pretty dramatic; maybe she needed to have a murder victim in her past--she'd probably tell me so herself, with a half-smile. ( )

A study in grief and the way you are simultaneously not of this world and way too much painfully in the world. Claire's lost her mother, her friend. The prose of this echoes what she's reading in school (where she's just trying to survive, graduate, move on) so there are moments of Dickinson, moments of W.C. Williams. Just gorgeous. I really have high Printz hopes for this one. ( )

This is such a heart felt story. This is abut a girl in her senior year of high school. She finds herself sink into a depression and grief after her mother commits suicide. we are taken on a journey through the eyes of a teenager as she deals with her mending heart, and finding new friends. GREAT BOOK! ( )