Book #47: "Far From Here"

When I was in high school, I was...not an exemplary student. I used to describe my scholastic approach as "did enough to get by", but that implies a level of foresight and planning that frankly was not present. In all honesty, I did the work I felt like doing. This naturally led to some difficulties in most of my classes (everything but choir, drama, Spanish, and, interestingly enough, geometry. I don't care for math classes generally but I loved my teacher.)

My grades suffered the most in English classes, which always surprised people. (Still does, as a matter of fact.) The problem was this: every English class I took in high school required the reading of several books over the course of the school year. And to make sure the books were read, the
various teachers all assigned a schedule; so many pages read by each date, and at each checkpoint some kind of response to the book would be required. What you thought the character was feeling, predictions about plot, thoughts about symbolism, etc.

So the issue I ran into (repeatedly) is that I would take the books home and read them in a couple of hours, and then either not bother to complete the responses at the required time (because I didn't feel like it) or just forget about them. Usually there would be four or five of those assignments per book. worth maybe five or ten points each, and to my knowledge I never did a single one. Missing one or two would not have affected my grade significantly; missing thirty or forty a year did. As a result, despite knowing the material and excelling on the tests, I barely got through English every single year.

Nowadays, they often print what I think of as English-class-assignment questions in the back of books, I think mostly to inspire discussion in book clubs. Given my relationship with such things, it is not difficult to imagine how I feel about them, But I occasionally scan them anyway, and in this book one of the questions about the ending did make me reconsider how I'd interpreted the book. So well done, Discussion Question People!

This was an ARC I got during my bookstore days. It's about relationships and discovering how well you can really know another person, even (and perhaps particularly) in marriage. I found it interesting and a little frustrating.

Author:  Nicole Baart

Potentially objectionable content: Some language, sex, intense scenes.