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Each summer, people flock to beaches and neighborhood pools, toting the latest romance novels and fluffy teen adventures to provide some light afternoon entertainment. But, in author Julie Schumacher’s teen novel The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls, four girls find themselves setting aside the typical poolside reads to spend a [forced] summer with some classics—and each other.
Adrienne Haus was supposed to spend the summer before her junior year of high school on a wilderness adventure in Canada with her best friend, Liz. Instead, she ends up stuck at home, her injured knee in a brace, forced to take part in a mother-daughter book club with a motley group of girls from school.
Adrienne is in awe of CeeCee, the rich, popular girl who seems to adopt Adrienne as her pet. She admires Jill, the calm, stable girl who seems to have her entire life charted out. And she’s baffled by Wallis, the secretive little genius with the voice of a bear cub and a mysterious past.
As they make their way through four of the books required for their AP English class, the four girls build a strange kind of bond based on their circumstances. At the same time, Adrienne struggles to come to grips with her past and find an identity of her own.
Formatted as an assigned essay about Adrienne’s summer reading, The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls is a kind of coming-of-age story, examining the lessons learned by one teenage girl during one strange summer. It’s filled with memorable characters that any young reader will easily recognize, but its focus is on the most nebulous character: Adrienne—who (like most normal teenage girls) struggles to figure out who she is and where she fits in. She feels strange and different, dull and directionless—feelings that anyone (even those of us who are well beyond our teenage years) can understand.
Throughout the novel, Schumacher weaves details of the girls’ four required reads (the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” along with Frankenstein, The House on Mango Street, and The Awakening) into Adrienne’s story, allowing the characters and their situations to mold—and often illuminate—Adrienne’s point of view throughout the summer. As she learns about these characters, she also learns a little more about herself.
Still, you don’t have to have read these other books to understand what’s going on in Adrienne’s story. Schumacher offers some information on each one, but she mostly allows the various themes and characters to make appearances in Adrienne’s summer. And, after reading about the books, you might find yourself searching them out, intrigued by Adrienne’s observations and wanting to explore them more.
The Unbearable Book Club is a wonderfully literate teen novel, working examples of literary terminology and a few works of classic literature into a thoughtful modern-day story about growing up—about the mistakes made and lessons learned along the way. More than just another fluffy romance, it’s an intelligent novel that encourages its readers to read even more, making it a worthy summer beach read for bookish teens.
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