Belzhar by Meg Wolitzer // A great plot, a bad MC

Belzhar by Meg Wolitzer
Genres: Contemporary (YA), Mystery (YA), Paranormal (YA)
Pages: 264
Goodreads

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, living with a weird roommate, and signed up for an exclusive, mysterious class called Special Topics in English.
But life isn’t fair, and Reeve Maxfield is dead.
Until a journal-writing assignment leads Jam to Belzhar, where the untainted past is restored, and Jam can feel Reeve’s arms around her once again. But there are hidden truths on Jam’s path 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.

The story starts off strong and, overall, it kept me intrigued. Despite my issues with the main character, I still wanted to know how it all ended. It also wasn’t exactly what I expected because it included some magical elements. The magical realism blended really well with the overall story.

What I really enjoyed about this story is that sometimes it had more to do with the group of students in the Special Topics class than just Jam (which is a great thing, for me). While I hoped for more character development, I thought that the inclusion of the other characters really brought the story together. 

This is a long one:

Here’s the thing about the characters: it was a potentially great cast, but lacked the amount of development needed, and it was told from a point-of-view that was hard to connect with.

Jam is the main character. I didn’t really connect with her throughout the story. She’s a 15-year-old girl who is in deep sadness because of the death of her boyfriend. At first, I thought “okay, she’s young, so this seems a little extreme, but a loss isn’t easy” then you discover that they weren’t together that long and it becomes a little ridiculous just how deep her grief for this boy is. It becomes petty, especially when you compare it to the other kids in the Special Topics class.

I’m not putting a grief point system on their problems, but I felt a little gypped once all of Jam’s story is revealed (because, of course, it’s saved until the end). It was emotional and dramatic and didn’t compare to the other characters.

I also found Jam to be very selfish. In this Special Topics class, there are only 5 hand-picked students. They’ve all had some sort of trauma happen to them in their life that brought them to The Wooden Barn and when they all come together, they share what happened to them. They open up about some hard topics, yet, when it’s Jam’s turn she decides she’s not ready. Then she has the nerve to ask to read one of the student’s journals to get to know their story more. This irritated me and made me really dislike her character.

On top of the lack of connection to Jam, it seemed like her relationships with other characters were poorly set up. One minute they’re strangers, the next they’re best friends. It didn’t work.

The writing had a simple, rawness to it. There wasn’t anything particularly spectacular about it, but it was very straight-forward. Some examples:

“I think not changing is sort of like dying.”

“We’re talking about the novel, right? But maybe we’re not. We’re talking about ourselves. And I guess that’s what can start to happen when you talk about a book.”

As for the pacing: this is a short book, so in a sense, it moved quickly. This book is under 300 pages which didn’t allow for a lot of wasted pages. The only time I felt the pacing was wrong, was the ending. The last few chapters were basically spent explaining everything to the reader which bored me. It felt like a rushed wrap-up of events.

This one is hard for me to rate. I think the lessons to be learned and the overall theme of this book was great, I just did not like the main character. If it was told from one of the other student’s perspectives, that might have changed my opinion. Alas, it wasn’t, I was stuck with Jam, who was selfish, petty, and overly dramatic. The big reveal about her story was absolutely ridiculous to me and I felt like it mocked people with more serious issues.

Rating Report
Plot
Characters
Writing
World Building
Overall:	3 / 5