Welcome back to “Worth the Read,” where I read books and share why they are, as the title suggests, worth the read. This month, I read A.S. King’s “Still Life With Tornado,” and it was amazing.

Let’s start with the plot. Sarah, who is 16, who lives in Philadelphia, is going through an existential crisis because she can’t draw a pear (there are other causes, but I can’t spoil the plot). She decides, due to this struggle, that she will not return to school. During her truancy, she meets herself at different ages and goes through an emotional journey as she comes to terms with her family life and how she got to where she is.

Now that that’s out of the way, onto the review!

Readability:

This book was written in the 2010s, so it’s obviously very accessible to a modern audience. The book isn’t really confusing if you ignore the whole this-girl-is-literally-interacting-with-herself-across-time-and-possibly-space, but that’s wholly unrelated to the readability of the piece.

Overall, a 10/10 for readability.

Content:

This book was a page-turner. Literally. I read the entire book in one night because it was just that captivating.

For one, I really loved Sarah’s arc. Her character growth was truly amazing. I mean, over the course of 300 pages, she went from walking around town eating food out of random trash cans during her existential crisis to making a plan to go back to school. While she’s the protagonist of this story, hers isn’t the only point of view that we get throughout the book.

Occasionally, we get to see the perspective of her mom, Helen. Helen, in my opinion, was just as interesting as Sarah, even though she only had a handful of chapters dedicated to her. In fact, Helen sets up the main conflict of the book.

One of the primary themes of the book is that things are not as they seem. Every character we meet is hiding something: Sarah is hiding the real reason why she isn’t going to school, Helen is hiding her past with her husband from Sarah and they’re both hiding what happened in Mexico from the reader. Honestly, it was kind of like a flipbook. Each additional page helped build the larger story about what was going on in Sarah’s life. It was a ride through the whole book to see what would happen to all of them.

While all of this is happening, Sarah is aided by her 10-, 23- and 40-year-old self. They’re also real, and other characters besides Sarah interact with them. It’s only really the 10-year-old Sarah that the book focuses on. It seemed a bit unnecessary at points to emphasize that there were multiple Sarahs, when the story could have worked with just the one 10-year-old Sarah.

Overall, this book was what I would consider slow and fast. The physical actions that the characters are taking meander, but their internal monologues are quick. They flip through time and space to slowly paint a portrait of a family being poisoned by one man.

Overall, content-wise, I would give this book a 9.5/10.
Writing:

It has good writing. Point blank. Based on A.S. King’s other novel, “Dig,” which features multiple perspectives, I expected to see the same thing when I picked this book up. The writing is witty and clear. The dialogue feels like I’m really talking to a person, and the monologues build on the concept of Sarah’s depression and various other issues.

I really like the repetition that I saw throughout the book and how the concept of originality developed as Sarah evolved. It felt like Sarah had grown. As she did, her monologues changed from describing life as pointless to finding the originality in everything.

Overall, a 10/10 for writing. The book has a nice message and it conveys it well. It is a little heavy-handed at the end, for Sarah literally says the message, but I can excuse that because it flows well within the larger story.

Overall:

Readability:10/10
Content: 9.5/10
Writing:10/10

This rounds out to a 9.8/10. Definitely worth the read. Honestly, I don’t think I can do the book justice based on this review alone. If I had to compare it to anything I’d read prior, it would have to be Celeste Ng’s “Everything I Never Told You.” “Still Life With Tornado” is a wild ride from start to finish and can be found in both the Brookline Public Library and the high school’s library. I highly recommend that you check it out!