A review by megancrews
Goodbye Stranger by Rebecca Stead
5.0
Rebecca Stead’s latest novel Goodbye Stranger is a shining example how amazing children’s realistic fiction can be. Stead dares to believe that children can grapple with big questions that secretly plague us about our place in the cosmos and that they will understand and relate to complex characters can’t explain why they do things like wear cat ears everyday. What she creates is a beautiful story that will be loved by readers young and old.
The story is told from three different points of view and different perspectives in time. Much of the narrative focuses on Bridge and her best friends who are trying their best to hold fast to one another during the tumultuous times of seventh grade as navigate their first forays in love and beginning to find their place in the bigger world around them.
Bridge also become close with the second narrator of the story, a boy named Sherm, who narrates to us through unsent letters to his grandfather who Sherm isn’t speaking to. The final narrator is an unnamed high school student speaking to us in second person from Valentine’s Day. Her story seems unrelated to the other characters except that it touches on the same themes of friendship, and finding out who the person you are becoming really is. In the end the stories fall perfectly together into an intricately crafted plot. This book is sure to be appeal to fans of Stead’s other works as well as fans of [b:Wonder|23302416|Wonder|R.J. Palacio|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1412358842s/23302416.jpg|16319487]Wonder.
The story is told from three different points of view and different perspectives in time. Much of the narrative focuses on Bridge and her best friends who are trying their best to hold fast to one another during the tumultuous times of seventh grade as navigate their first forays in love and beginning to find their place in the bigger world around them.
Bridge also become close with the second narrator of the story, a boy named Sherm, who narrates to us through unsent letters to his grandfather who Sherm isn’t speaking to. The final narrator is an unnamed high school student speaking to us in second person from Valentine’s Day. Her story seems unrelated to the other characters except that it touches on the same themes of friendship, and finding out who the person you are becoming really is. In the end the stories fall perfectly together into an intricately crafted plot. This book is sure to be appeal to fans of Stead’s other works as well as fans of [b:Wonder|23302416|Wonder|R.J. Palacio|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1412358842s/23302416.jpg|16319487]Wonder.