Sarah Winifred Searle

In 1996 Chicago, thirteen-year-old Harriet Flores, struggling with boredom, loneliness, and a chronic illness, lets her imagination run wild--with mixed results--and learns about the power of storytelling.

Sincerely, Harriet

always, annej 〄

Thank you to Netgalley for the Advance Reader's Copy in exchange for an honest review. 

"Stories are good company, aren't they? Always there for us when we need them."

I like the colorful drawings of the characters and the meaningful content of each bubble head. It is also a fast-paced story wherein it will leave you searching for more answers. The ending is not quite satisfying but all in all, the whole graphic novel is good.

We live in a world of #depressedpeople and tend to rant about all things unpleasant in life. But, do we even think of those people dying from sickness in their physical bodies when we said "I want to die" repeatedly? Like it's just an expression, a chant when you feel lonely or you're so sad you think you can't take everything. Remember what Charles Buchowski said in his book Perks o Being a Wallflower that "Others have it a lot worse."

"They think I'm scared of being sick, but it's not really that. They don't understand." 

This is a story of a sick teenager who is in dire need of normalcy in her life.
"I don't want to be a teenager who can't go to sleepovers because I'm scared I might wet the bed. I want to find real friends who actually like the same stuff I do, and I want to do normal friend things with them and I'm just so tired of being alone."

Some of the quotes that I like in this book says: 

"Don't be sorry, be better."

"Next time you're tempted to make things up, why don't you try writing them down?"

She has a librarian friend! How nice it is to have someone to lend you books! But she doesn't really like books that much and it kind of irritate me she acts that way. But maybe, there's a reason for it throughout the book. Just like what her librarian friend on a remark on The Secret Garden, "Mary Lennox has her flaws, yes. But that's part of what makes her story so satisfying." We shouldn't really judge right away. "She grows a lot over the course of the book," she added and that makes me think of really good books that have dull beginnings but boomed before it ends and ends up we don't want to finish them right away. 

One time in their conversation, what the librarian said got me. After Harriet, said she likes movies better than books because it's tough to read, she said "I suppose they're not at all different, are they? Just different ways to tell stories." Few pages before the ending, Pearl the Librarian and Harriet got into another book talk. When Harry said that the book got her thinking, Pearl replied "A book can surprise you that way," and this, I think, is the truest thing in the story. 

Here's the most important lesson I learned from the story: "It's okay to be sad and scared sometimes, but I promise you're not alone. We're all in this together."

Samantha Seeman

This is a graphic novel about a lonely young girl who has moved away during the summer. Her parents work a lot so she is often alone in their apartment, when she isn’t visiting with the landlady Pearl downstairs. Harriet has a tendency to make things up, something you deal with throughout the story, which makes her an unreliable character at times. Her summer of reading and learning about her landlady’s (once) sick son Nicholas helps to set Harriet up for a new school year in a new place. It does have some interesting representations, but talking about it might spoil some of the “mystery” that Harriet inevitably procures due to her “storytelling.”

Sincerely, Harriet

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