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thisbeereads 's review for:
Then Wake Me Up: when society gets brighter
by Paris Cunningham
Thank you so much to the author for sending an eARC my way in exchange for an honest review. I shall certainly try my best!
This is a series of poems written when the author was between the ages of 11 and 16, and its intended for an audience roughly in the 12-18 age range. As somebody who is... definitely not there, this is certainly something that I aimed to keep in mind while I was reading. It could be cleaned up a bit more in editing as far as some spelling and grammar errors, but that’s alright. I also want to make sure to note that I am a casual enjoyer of poetry at best, I am certainly no expert in the technicalities of it, I simply know what I like or don’t like when I see it.
You can definitely tell that the author was young when they wrote this, it’s written with the broad and dramatic strokes of emotion that all teenagers are prone to viewing the world in. The way we often were sure that we were the only ones feeling the way we did or the way we could angrily question God. I’m no longer quite in that place, which in many spots left me a bit on the outside looking in, just being able to connect in the sense of “yeah, I was there once” but there were still so many lines that made me pause, made me reread, made me say them slowly out loud, made me just FEEL because there was so much power in them or so much relatability that managed to transcend a generation.
Some poems I needed to take a double take on to grasp their meaning (Dismissed) while others felt a little out of place, more an exercise in imagination encouraging the reader to build a story behind it to explain just what in the world is going on. (Extinct)
The second poem in this little book, I Don’t Know, is probably the one that I related to the least for a lot of reasons - and yet was somehow the one that I highlighted the most. There are some amazingly home-hitting lines in here.
The opening to Man was a beat. And the whole message of Don’t Fear The Monster, Fear The Cause is a theme that I overall love in all aspects.
Overall, I found this collection to be a great foundation. I think it absolutely will hit with its intended audience, while it still offers potential for those beyond it. I absolutely look forward to seeing how the author has developed since this point and how they might tackle these sensitive topics these days with a more matured mindset.
This is a series of poems written when the author was between the ages of 11 and 16, and its intended for an audience roughly in the 12-18 age range. As somebody who is... definitely not there, this is certainly something that I aimed to keep in mind while I was reading. It could be cleaned up a bit more in editing as far as some spelling and grammar errors, but that’s alright. I also want to make sure to note that I am a casual enjoyer of poetry at best, I am certainly no expert in the technicalities of it, I simply know what I like or don’t like when I see it.
You can definitely tell that the author was young when they wrote this, it’s written with the broad and dramatic strokes of emotion that all teenagers are prone to viewing the world in. The way we often were sure that we were the only ones feeling the way we did or the way we could angrily question God. I’m no longer quite in that place, which in many spots left me a bit on the outside looking in, just being able to connect in the sense of “yeah, I was there once” but there were still so many lines that made me pause, made me reread, made me say them slowly out loud, made me just FEEL because there was so much power in them or so much relatability that managed to transcend a generation.
Some poems I needed to take a double take on to grasp their meaning (Dismissed) while others felt a little out of place, more an exercise in imagination encouraging the reader to build a story behind it to explain just what in the world is going on. (Extinct)
The second poem in this little book, I Don’t Know, is probably the one that I related to the least for a lot of reasons - and yet was somehow the one that I highlighted the most. There are some amazingly home-hitting lines in here.
The opening to Man was a beat. And the whole message of Don’t Fear The Monster, Fear The Cause is a theme that I overall love in all aspects.
Overall, I found this collection to be a great foundation. I think it absolutely will hit with its intended audience, while it still offers potential for those beyond it. I absolutely look forward to seeing how the author has developed since this point and how they might tackle these sensitive topics these days with a more matured mindset.