Belzhar Review

Goodreads

TITLE: Belzhar

AUTHOR: Meg Wolitzer

PUBLISHER: Dutton Books For Young Readers

PUBLICATION DATE: 9/30/2014

PAGES: 272

FORMAT: ARC

SOURCE: Amazon Vine

MY RATING: 

BACK COVER SUMMARY: If life were fair, Jam Gallahue would still be at home in New Jersey with her sweet British boyfriend, Reeve Maxfield. She'd be watching old comedy sketches with him. She'd be kissing him in the library stacks.

She certainly wouldn't be at The Wooden Barn, a therapeutic boarding school in rural Vermont, living with a weird roommate, and signed up for an exclusive, supposedly life-changing class called Special Topics in English.

But life isn't fair, and Reeve Maxfield is dead.

When a journal-writing assignment leads Jam into a mysterious otherworld she and her classmates call Belzhar, she discovers a realm where the untainted past is restored, and she can feel Reeve's arms around her once again. But, a the pages of her journal begin to fill up, Jam must confront hidden truths and ultimately decide what she's willing to sacrifice to reclaim her loss.

OVERALL IMPRESSION: I love reading books about boarding schools, and for some reason have this obsession with them, so I was really excited to start reading this.  The students in the Special Topics class this year are studying the works of Sylvia Plath, and because of that after reading this I really want to read "The Bell Jar." 

I love the idea behind this story. I haven't ever read anything like it and the topic was something that really stood out to me. I liked the progression of the story and I was really interested to see what was going to happen at the end of the book, but I was disappointed with the last part of the book. The ending itself was find, but the part leading up to the ending where we learn more about what Jam went through was not what I was expecting and I didn't like it at all.

CHARACTERS: I feel like there could have been some more character development. I would have liked to know more about all of the students in the Special Topics class as well as Jam's roommate. I liked all of the characters, but I felt like I didn't know them enough.

COVER: I love how the cover incorporates so many things from the book.

**Thanks to Amazon and Dutton Books for providing me with an ARC for my honest review.