Skip to main content

She Loves You: Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

By

She Loves You: Yeah, Yeah, Yeah
By Ann Hood
Penguin Random House, 2018. Fiction p. 252

Set in the height of popularity of The Beatles, “She Loves You: Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” is a truly delightful historical fiction that explores the summer of 1966 from our main character’s point of view as she obsesses over The Beatles and seeing them in concert while simultaneously dealing with her own personal struggles.

Trudy shares a love of The Beatles with her dad, and her closest friends. But as their concert quickly approaches, she finds that her life is changing all around her, and she doesn’t seem to have any control over it. Trudy is convinced that if she just sees The Beatles in concert and meets Paul McCartney, her father will be more present, her best friend will start actually acting like her best friend, and her life will make sense again.

Hood does an excellent job making Trudy a protagonist that sometimes isn’t perfectly likable, but who is always relatable. Her problems are the same ones that all kids growing up are able to connect with, even though they weren’t alive in the sixties during Beatlemania. Although young readers will not have experienced the cultural phenomenon of The Beatles, they will still see themselves reflected in the universal struggles of family and friendship that even kids in the sixties went through. The effect that music has always had on tween culture will resonate with kids even if they don’t experience nostalgia for the decade represented.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Factory

By
The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: Blood in the Water

By
Blood in the Water By Tiffany D. Jackson New York: Scholastic, 2025. Fiction. 255 pages. 12-year-old Kaylani McKinnon can't help but feel like a fish out of water. She's a Brooklyn girl spending her summer on Martha's Vineyard surrounded by wealthy family friends in their mansion. All she really wants is to stay home all summer where she her incarcerated father can easily reach her, and she can keep working to find ways to prove him innocent of fraud and embezzlement. Despite her protests, she finds herself on the island with the snooty granddaughters of her host. Soon after Kaylani's arrival, a popular teen boy is found murdered and she decides to conduct her own investigation. As she tries to discover what happened to Chadwick Cooper, Kaylani finds that not everything on Martha's Vineyard is as perfect as it appears. Thrillers for middle grade readers can be hard to find, but Tiffany D. Jackson succeeds in her first middle grade novel. A quick moving plot, tight d...
Post a Comment
Read more

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry

By DeeDee
National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry Edited by J. Patrick Lewis National Geographic, 2012, 183 p. Poetry In this beautiful poetry collection, the National Children's Poet Laureate, J. Patrick Lewis, has teamed up with the amazing photographers at National Geographic. The result is 200 poems about animals, all illustrated with stunning nature photography.  The poems are well chosen and include rhyming, free verse, and shape poetry. Some of the poems are funny, many are contemplative and all are nicely typeset on top of the full color photographs. One of my favorites is a shape poem about flamingos, with a photograph of a flock of flamingos which seem to be standing the the shape of a flamingo (how did they do that?).  Lewis ends the collection with a brief but interesting section about writing animal poetry.  This selection is sure to turn any animal lover into a poetry lover.
Post a Comment
Read more