All 17 year-old Josh Bennett wants is to build furniture and be left alone, and everyone allows it because it’s easier to pretend he doesn’t exist. When your name is synonymous with death, everyone tends to give you your space.
Everyone except Nastya, a hot mess of a girl who starts showing up and won’t go away until she’s insinuated herself into every aspect of his life. The more he gets to know her, the more of a mystery she becomes. As their relationship intensifies and the unanswered questions begin to pile up, he starts to wonder if he may ever learn the secrets she’s been hiding or if he even wants to.
The Sea of Tranquility is a slow-building, character-driven romance about a lonely boy, an emotionally fragile girl, and the miracle of second chances.
5 STARS out of 5
TITLE: The Sea of Tranquility
AUTHOR: Katja Millay
GENRE: Young Adult
Wow. I'm amazed at the writing. It's emotionally charged in a really beautiful way.
The thoughts conveyed throughout the book weren't phenomenal, just simply amazing. I applaud the author for that. For her to be able to describe the thoughts in smooth, convincing details, she must be really good at human psychology.
This book helped me figure out some things about life. It was that insightful. It helped me confirm that I'm not the only one who felt certain things, even if Nastya is just a fictional character. I could include few excerpts, but this one felt the most enlightening for me, yet somehow minor at least:
I’ve done the support group thing, too, but I hated it even before I stopped talking. I never understood how hearing everyone else’s shit stories was supposed to make me feel better about mine. Everyone sits around and laments the crap hands they’ve been dealt. Maybe I’m just not a sadist. It doesn’t comfort me to see other people as annihilated as I am...
Plus, support groups get a little antagonistic when you don’t talk. It’s like you’re pilfering everyone else’s pain, taking, but not offering anything in return.
It wasn't an actual support group per se. I quit a religious cell group months ago, because it was pressuring me to always show up at certain events in a week. Maybe I'm not that committed; but the truth is, listening to other people's problems regularly made me feel useless since I didn't have big problems like them. (Not that I'm hoping to have bigger problems.)
Aside from listening to their problems and the cliché encouragements I throw their way, I didn't have much else to say. So I stopped showing up.
Hmm. Now that I thought about it, I realized why I love to read. And of course, why I love reading good books like this one.
Reading is some sort of a therapy for me. With feel-good books, reading is an escape from reality. Like how other people would mostly feel.
But once in a while, I come across a book of high caliber. Not because of the words used, but with how those words were used fluidly.
This book is one of them.
Reading this is a grasp of reality. Something to correlate with what's happening in my life. Not that I'm a victim or anything, but this one touched fragments of my life. As exampled above.
The Sea of Tranquility might be a slow read but this got me really emotionally invested. And I love it when books make me cry.