Review: What to say next by Julie Buxbaum

Hi Munchworms!

I got some book mail earlier this week and immediately threw aside the e-ARC I was reading because… What to say next finally arrived!
After reading so many positive reviews about this book, I just couldn’t not read it. So thank you to everyone that already wrote a review on this book for motivating me even more! Without those reviews, this book would have ended up in my endless pile of TBR’s and only the skies know when I would’ve finally picked it up…

Sometimes a new perspective is all that is needed to make sense of the world.

KIT:I don’t know why I decide not to sit with Annie and Violet at lunch. It feels like no one here gets what I’m going through. How could they? I don’t even understand.

DAVID:In the 622 days I’ve attended Mapleview High, Kit Lowell is the first person to sit at my lunch table. I mean, I’ve never once sat with someone until now. “So your dad is dead,” I say to Kit, because this is a fact I’ve recently learned about her. 

When an unlikely friendship is sparked between relatively popular Kit Lowell and socially isolated David Drucker, everyone is surprised, most of all Kit and David. Kit appreciates David’s blunt honesty—in fact, she finds it bizarrely refreshing. David welcomes Kit’s attention and her inquisitive nature. When she asks for his help figuring out the how and why of her dad’s tragic car accident, David is all in. But neither of them can predict what they’ll find. Can their friendship survive the truth?

When I started reading, it wasn’t long before I figured out how different Kit and David are. I really felt like a spectator watching how both of them tried to figure out how to interact and understand one another. This may sound like a bad thing, but believe me when I tell you it wasn’t a bad thing at all. On the contrary.
This book needs you to be a spectator to understand how people view others, judge others so quickly and often don’t bother putting in the effort to understand. Understand something? Someone? No. Just understand. Everything. Anything.

I laughed out loud reading this book – actually, I think I snorted once. – and I even put it aside at certain points because I some things were so frustrating to read that I just… Couldn’t. But that made me love What to say next even more.

“Much like ordering steak and naming children, language seems inherently and irrationally optimistic; we just assume other people understand what we are talking about.”

I won’t say anything more about this book, simply because I don’t want to risk spoiling even the smallest thing if you haven’t read it yet. But I’m asking you to go to the bookstore, buy this book and read it.

This is a book everybody should read because it will change your views on many things. You’ll be more conscious of the things you do, say, think.

What to say next perfectly portrays one of the biggest problems in our society. Misconception, misunderstanding and the fear of everything out of the ordinary.
Especially the latter.

This is a 5/5. Or a 10/5.

And I’m adding a yummy strawberry milkshake to this, because it fits the cover and I probably won’t ever think of something that fits this book. It’s too special to fit something as ordinary as food. And that says a lot coming from the person who created Books & Munches.

Kathy

 

 I paid full-price for this book. This is my honest review for which I am not being compensated in any way. All opinions are fully my own.

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