without, naturally, the benzos.Īs a female-person, it's hard not to want to love a book that's so oohrah girl power and full of smart math-loving girlnerds who say things likeĪnd that's emphasizing confidence and empowerment and athleticism and building strong female friendships, but it's just so excessively 'HOLY ROLE MODEL, BATMAN!' that it becomes off-putting. i think i would have felt talked-down to, the way religious material directed at teens misses that target of age-appropriateness by presenting unilaterally shiny and morally flawless characters who are perky and great at everything and willing to pitch in and fight fire and succor the needy, perfect and unstoppable like a fifties housewife on benzos. Maybe i'm just accustomed to the way teens in the YA novels i read sound like they're twenty-five and maybe this is a more accurate representation of how teens really speak and behave, but it still felt really childish and i don't think me-as-teen would have liked it. and having already adjusted (not lowered, mind you, but adjusted) my expectations to teen mode, i found myself requiring additional mental adjustments to try to fit in with the enthusiastic fans - to be the thoughtful reader this book deserved. young enough that you could probably get away with marketing this to a middle grade audience without any comprehension/content concerns. So when i finally decided to board this lumberjane-bandwagon and found it officially categorized in the teen section of the bookstore, it threw me for a loop for a second, but then i was all 'i am glad i am now so broad-minded in the scope of my reading that i am not unwilling to read a book for a teen audience.' i saw that people were adding it to their YA shelves, but i've come to terms with the fact that as long as there's a teenage character in a book, people are gonna shelve it as YA on goodreads regardless of whether it's intended for teen readers, or even appropriate for them.

When this book first started making the rounds here on goodreads, for some reason i didn't clock that it was YA. I am a fan of the spirit and the messaging and the energy of this book but i'm not personally crazy about either the artwork or the story.

Lumberjanes by N.D. Stevenson