Catalyst

Read this several years ago (like maybe in college?) and liked it more then than I do now. It's not a bad book at all, but I probably don't overidentify with a tightly-wound high school senior as much as I did then.

Very Good. Crappy Ending though. No one ever seems to get those right ( except Markus Zusak but he hasn't written too many books and this woman has, so maybe she just used up her skills.

I loved Speak and Wintergirls. Laurie Halse Anderson's writing is very poetic and descriptive and I feel like her words are floating around in the air like clouds, lightweight yet heavy with meaning. The one fangirl moment I had while reading Catalyst was when Melinda makes a quick appearance. Speaking(!), happy and full of life for a brief moment.

I should have known there was something that would break me and unfortunately I got to that part at my break before I was going to sleep so I had to continue reading because I could not go to bed with that being the last thought in my head.

I wonder how impactful this book would be for a young adult and if it would be as meaningful to them as it was to me. I found Kate to be kind of a pushover and even at the end she wasn't someone who stood up for herself as much as I needed her to. There was very little resolution, but there was an ending. Does that make sense?

I didn't find any characters well rounded or sympathetic. Kate treated her brother like a kid yet I found him to be more mature than that. Her father just seemed like a mess, her best friend was just there and her boyfriend was flat and uninteresting.

In the end, I thought the whole thing, like Pangborn, kind of fell flat.