Mostly Exchange

Finished this at an unearthly hour of the morning somewhere between Dublin and Bristol and am dying for someone else to read it now so I can discuss it. Which is not the only reason I'd recommend it. Honestly.

This wasn't an easy book in some ways, as it's about a 16 year old boy, Simon, who has to go live with his grandparents after his parents die in a plane crash. (Personal aside warning, skip at will - my father died when I was 7, and I'd been sent to the States because he was ill, so the fear that my mother would die as well terrified me constantly when I was growing up.) He's shy and insecure and makes no friends at school (oh, how grim the descriptions of his school are!), so ends up going out exploring every Saturday with his equally voracious-reader grandmother - mostly going into charity shops and buying stacks of old books. Several times as I was reading I felt 'Oh yes - that's just how loss is' or '...just how reading is'. And sometimes I also felt that it was just how it was when reading got - slightly wrong, I suppose. And why not? In one way, books and a reader are a relationship, and like the other relationships in this one, sometimes they get slightly - or seriously - on the wrong track. I liked it that sometimes, mostly, the people involved could see it and cared enough to try to get it right (again). Even if right as it could be wasn't necessarily wonderful.

There were times I felt differently, and wondered where on earth he was going with it - a few scenes might have been verging close to melodrama, I guess, but I was pretty happy with where it all fell down in the end. Or not really 'all fell down', as a good few things were left nicely open, characters were still finding out what they wanted and there wasn't any one Answer.

Short quote, from near the end but not a spoiler, as I'll remove one character's name (given up on trying to tab):

'The books themselves aren't valuable, that's what [she] said,' Winnie mused. 'She said that people and characters and stories are valuable, and it's them we should hoard and look after. Not the objects.'
They all thought about this. A particular edition of Grimms' Fairy Tales snagged Simon's attention. He plucked it up. 'Personally,' he said, 'I like the actual objects, too.'

Amen! And currently reading John Green's An Abundance of Katherines, another book which makes me glad not to be relying solely on charity shop book buys...