Not Ready, Okay?

I just finished Ready, Okay! by Adam Cadre. I wasn't very happy about it. I mean, I thought the book was absolutely amazing. I just wasn't very happy about being done with it. I wanted to keep reading and reading and reading. That is the mark of a very good book.

For starters, though this is a story narrated by a high school-age kid, Allen, it's not your run-of-the-mill teenage lit novel. In fact, it's anything but. On the very first page, in the very first sentence, Allen lets you in on the big event of the book that doesn't happen for a couple hundred more pages.

This worked to get me interested, yet it also gave me plenty of time to forget it. Or so I thought. It's not so unusual to encounter the end of the story at the very beginning. But in Ready, Okay!, the end is merely hinted at. Then, to create some more intrigue, it's mentioned again and again throughout the rest of the book...right up until it actually happens. This was something very new to me, and I loved it.

I basically loved everything about this book, however, and I don't want to leave those other essential parts of the complexity of my love for this book out. I'll make a general list of everything I loved:

1) It's hilarious. I've been reading it for the past few days, and even when I was in the middle of a silent classroom, I'd laugh out loud. The humor in the book is sharp and makes me smile just thinking about it. Books that can get you to vocalize your emotions as you're reading are usually pretty good.

2) The characters. This book is filled to the brim with the quirkiest, most intriguing, beautiful, dysfunctional, profound, despicable characters I've ever read. There was someone for me to love, someone for me to hate, someone for me to be unsure of how I felt about...Another mark of a good book is when you find yourself thinking about the characters as if they were real people; away from the context of the story. I found myself constantly imagining how Allen would react to this, or how Echo would reply, or what Peggy would say. I absolutely loved the characters, and I wouldn't change a thing about any of them.

3) Saying that this book was "fast-paced" seems like something that would cheapen it; or at least liken it to a car chase, gunfire type book (although I can't say there wasn't some of both of those in the story....). I will say that this book kept me on the edge of my seat. Not so much because at every moment someone's life was in danger, but because I just had to know. I had to know about these people's lives and how they lived and reacted to the crappiness that high school and dysfunctional families were composed of. At any moment someone could say something incredibly thought-provoking or just plain hilarious.

4) Laughter was not the only emotion this book got me to vocalize. I was reading furiously in class, and my friend looked over. She said, "What's wrong?! You look so stressed!" I gave a very brief explanation- I was reading and almost near the end and I just really really really couldn't talk right then- and then kept reading. A few minutes later, I was crying. I would've cried a LOT harder, but I reminded myself of my surroundings that had disappeard for some time, and kept a lot of my emotions in. A book that made me laugh out loud and cry within the span of 20 minutes is a book worth remembering.

There are countless other reasons that I liked this book. I liked the way it was written, the words the author used, and, as usual, I loved the friends forever relationship between Peggy and Allen. I didn't want it to end because it was just a great book.

One of my favorite quotes from the book was this:

"'Because I spend a couple minutes with someone and they start to seem less like a miracle and more like an unfortunate accident. But not with you. You're the one person where I can always see the miracle. I have no idea why. And I don't care. I love you.'"

A very, very good book.