Entertainment Weekly’s Best YA Book of 2014
TIME magazine Top YA of 2014
"Wolitzer has imagined a world for young readers that celebrates the sacred, transcendent power of reading and writing." —The New York Times Book Review
There’s a place where the lost go to be found.
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, signed up for an exclusive, supposedly life-changing class called Special Topics in English that focuses—only and entirely—on the works of Sylvia Plath.
But life isn’t fair. Reeve has been gone for almost a year and Jam is still mourning.
When a journal-writing assignment leads Jam into a mysterious other world 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, as the pages of her journal begin to fill up, Jam must to confront hidden truths and ultimately decide what she’s willing to sacrifice to reclaim her loss.
From New York Times bestselling author Meg Wolitzer comes a breathtaking and surprising story about first love, deep sorrow, and the power of acceptance.
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting premise
By Dawn Kessinger
I liked "Belzhar" for several reasons. One being its interesting premise of escape to an inventive - but limited - place which proves to be healing and helpful, as well as painful, for the students who are a part of a special English class. I was drawn in and captivated by the details of Sylvia Plath's life and writing, which is the focus of the class. I liked and felt involved with the lives, problems, relationships and growth of students in the class, the teacher, the secondary characters (roommates, leader of the a cappella group, families) and the mysteries surrounding Belzhar.Jam's story is fairly intriguing and sympathetic to begin with, though she seems shallow - or not fully drawn - at times. The reader is held in suspense regarding some important details in Jam's story, but that was OK. I found myself disappointed when I learned "the rest" of Jam's story, though - mostly because I didn't find it believable. Maybe if Jam had not been telling the story, I wouldn't have felt as let down. I was more interested in Sierra's story (Jam's best friend) of a missing little brother and Griffin's story of surviving a fire and dealing with the guilt of other living things' deaths; actually, I felt more connected with all the other teenagers in Jam's class than I did with her - their stories were more interesting, more believable, and made me feel more deeply.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Sad and Beautiful
By OutlawPoet
I really wasn't sure I was going to like Belzhar - mostly because I didn't understand the name. I know, it seems a silly reason to think you won't like a book, but I abhor weird and hard to pronounce names in books because they tend to jar me out of the story as I mentally figure out how to pronounce them.If you're like me, don't worry about this one. It's the only weird word in the book, and it's explained in such a way that it makes perfect sense.Now, to the book.This is a beautifully written little book about a group of teens who are dealing with tragedy and loss. Although each has had a vastly different loss experience, they end up together at a school for kids who have issues. A small group of them are put into a special English class where they are to study just one author - Sylvia Plath. But the class is something far from ordinary and their lives will never be the same again.I've been lucky in my life. I've never dealt with depression or loss the way the kids in this book do. As a result, I don't know if this would ring true for someone dealing with these issues. I can only say that it felt very authentic.I did wonder, however, if I had a child who struggled with depression - would I want her/him to read this book? The answer is: probably not. It's a very sad book, and the teens deal with their depression by rather magical means. Under the surface are some real life ways to deal with loss, but it's offset by the fairy godmother aspect of it all.There is a bit of a surprise in the book, but it was one that saddened me immensely. Kudos to the author for pulling it off so seamlessly, but I ended the book feeling a bit blue.A very sad, beautifully written book.
12 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Special Topics in English
By Roger Brunyate
This is a young adult novel. I am a decidedly older adult; my children are long out of their teens, and my grandchildren are not yet into them. So I don't represent the target group, even by proxy. And yet Meg Wolitzer did such a superb job of writing about teenage characters in THE INTERESTINGS, and I have such respect for her as a writer, period, that I was very interested to see how she would tackle writing not just about but also FOR teens. It seems to me she handles it superbly.Reading the book description, I did wonder if this was going to be INTERESTINGS-lite. There, we had a small group of talented friends bonding at a summer camp; here we have a similar group at a Vermont boarding school for talented teens who may be psychologically fragile. As in the earlier book, we even have a in-group of the chosen: the Special Topics in English class hand-picked by its teacher, Mrs. Quennell. It soon becomes clear that the five students in the class are all damaged by trauma. Casey has been confined to a wheelchair; Sierra has lost her brother; Marc's family has broken up; Griffin, who grew up on a local farm, is afraid of fire; and Jam (for Jamaica) Gallahue, the novel's narrator, has lost the love of her life, an exchange student from England called Reeve. Very soon, all comparisons have been forgotten; you are completely drawn into these kids and their personalities, and swept up by Jam's voice, whose balance between humor and pain Wolitzer has judged perfectly.Pronounce "Belzhar" with a J sound for the "zh" and you get... heck, the book is even illustrated on the cover! For the Special Topic in Mrs. Q's class is of course Sylvia Plath's novel THE BELL JAR, her life, and poetry. When she announces this, the students raise red flags: is it, well, wise to study a book dealing with suicide with kids who have been classed as fragile? Frankly, I wondered too. But neither teacher nor author goes anywhere near suicide. In other respects, Wolitzer treats her readers as near-adults: they clearly know the swearing, sex, and drugs that are so much a part of the big world, and may even have experimented a little themselves, though Wolitzer is careful to keep their actual behavior moderate. Indeed, for the first third of the book, her storytelling, without ever being preachy, is almost a primer on how to work with young people to restore their broken sense of themselves. And about the power of words."Belzhar," it turns out, relates not to the Plath book, but to the other part of Mrs. Q's requirement: that the students fill in the old-fashioned journals she hands out for them. Whenever a student begins to write in a journal, Wolitzer steps away from her realistic story to enter a kind of time-warp. I did wonder if she needed to, but then I came to accept these moments as a metaphor for the kind of healing that happens in real life. One by one, we learn more about the nature of each student's trauma, and begin to see how they might get past it. But it is far from a matter of counting down the numbers; Wolitzer is wonderfully varied in her reveals, and even allows room for occasional setbacks (one of them very serious). And she is good at teasers. Jam had opened the book with her tragedy ("I was sent here because of a boy. His name was Reeve..."), yet it is not until the very end that we find out what happened. When we do, I wondered whether Wolitzer had not once again changed the unwritten rules, but I came to accept the rightness of this too. This is an author who understands young people. What she has written is truly a gift to them, and to their parents.
