Somebody Everybody Listens To

Life as a teenager brings trials and tribulations, seeking one’s purpose in life and losing what you cherished most.

The novel Somebody Everybody Listens To by Suzanne Supplee follows the life of Retta Lee Jones as she aspires to leave her hum-drum life of waiting tables at Bluebell’s Diner to await the day that she can leave her small town and head toward the bright lights of Nashville to become a country singer.

With only $500 in her jeans pocket and an old Caprice Classic, Retta leaves home upon graduating high school hoping that the power of talent, drive and determination will inevitably prevail and help her wishes come true.

Consequently, the chances of becoming a successful country singer is about as likely as Dolly Parton's boobs being real (I know that they are, but they still look fake...) .

Upon her arrival to Music City, Retta gets mugged, loses all of her savings and ends up sleeping in the back seat of her car and resorts to  bathing hobo style in public restroom sinks.

After a while, things begin to look up. Retta manages to snag her first singing gig in a local honky-tonk inn outside Nashville. But after barely getting paid, she manages to snare a open spot, singing at an open mic night at the Mockingbird Café, a hot-spot for lots of singers to be discovered.    

As things started getting better and better, they all seemed to fall apart yet again. Amidst a family crisis, Retta comes to the realization that the life she had hoped for, will take longer to achieve.

Somebody Everybody Listens To is a breath of fresh air; the yin to my yang of literature. Its message and story is not overplayed like the various fantasy, and fiction novels thrown around young adult literature.

Its bittersweet determination and failure complex is a great treasure to behold. After each page, I expected something to happen, and all of a sudden, the story turned at a whole other corner, leaving me wanting to only continue.

Lovers and haters of country music alike, will be enthralled by this wondrous story as each chapter commences. Focusing on Retta’s stilled determination to not give up when odds are against her and the combination of sincerity while avoiding an overly sappy tale is a truly warming experience.

Coffeehouse Angel

Living in a time in which showing that one cares, is something many people strive to live by. Coffeehouse Angel is a fantastic book to get anyone in the mood to give back during the upcoming holiday season.

Filled to the brim with a rather unique and inspiring storyline, the main character, Katrina, immediately demonstrates an act of kindness in the first few pages of the book.  She helps a “homeless” man lying amongst the oddments in an alleyway along the side of her grandmother’s coffeehouse.

Immediately, the man attempts to repay her for her act of kindness but Katrina repeatedly mentions that she does not need anything in return. What she doesn’t know is that he has a secret which requires him to give someone that helps him something in return.

As the story progresses, Katrina’s random acts of kindness begin to pay off, but also begin to throw some curve balls her way. Just as things begin to look up, there is always something that has to get in the way.

Now the alleged homeless man is everywhere she turns, and begins to put her in some rather sticky situations. In the end, it takes a major disaster to strike in order for Katrina to put her best foot forward and prevail.

This story is full of courage and funny situations but also, the message is better than that of any book I have read. No matter what the time of the year is and no matter what one has heard, helping someone could be the best thing one could ever do. Whether it includes giving a homeless person spare change, or leftover food from a lunch that may end up being stuck in the fridge for later.

It’s books like these that are generally overlooked because they may be deemed as cheesy, but in this case, the cheesiest books are the best books. As opposed to the pop fluff written in books these days, I genuinely recommend this book to anyone searching for a laugh, but also an underlying message to make everyone feel a little brighter and maybe find an angel.

The Splendor Falls

Whoever coined  the phrase,"never judge a book by its cover," was absoulutely right. The Splendor Falls by Rosemary Clement-Moore, is one book whose cover deceives the reader but does not disappoint on the inside.

      There was no summary for the book, and the cover looked as boring as lima beans. But I took the chance and checked it out, instantly falling in love after the first chapter.  

    This story is about Sylvie Davis, a ballerina who can no longer dance due to a broken leg that unfortunately ends her career. But Sylvie’s problems run deeper than a healing broken leg.  What hurt her most was her father’s death, and what is tearing at her spirit is her mother’s remarriage to a psychologist, who thinks Sylvie needs to be evaluated.

    The only way Sylvie’s mother is able to tame her unhappiness, is to uproot her from her Manhattan apartment and ship her to Alabama. There, Sylvie’s father’s cousin is restoring the family estate in a town overflowing with her family’s history.

    Upon her arrival, Sylvie comes to the realization that her family has a lot more history than she ever knew. An even more unsettling thought is about the two guys that she cannot stop thinking about. Shawn Maddox, the residential prize boy, seems to be perfect in every way, but underneath all of that perfect, is a sinister mind. Rhys—a handsome but very mysterious foreign guest of her cousin, has Sylvie lost in confusion about who he really is.

    As an avid reader of supernatural novels, the imagery in this particular book truly captures the essence of a modern supernatural story. I managed to finish reading this over 500 page book in around 12 hours, with some interruptions, but could not bear to put it down after the first chapter.

    I highly recommend this book for teenage girls because of its pure genius. I do not think I have ever encountered a book like this one. At first the story comes off as being normal, like a story about a regular person’s life, but then it changes. At first the transition caught me off guard, but then it all seemed to come together to a great finish.