The Disenchantments - YA Bingo

Completed on: July 6th

# of Pages: 307

Bingo Category: A Book Set In The Summer

This is a book I recently ordered because it's one I enjoyed a few years back when it first arrived at the bookstore where I work. I took it out on a book loan, read through it pretty quickly, and clearly the story, characters and general atmosphere of this novel stuck with me enough to feel the desire to order my own copy years later.

Since then a paperback copy of this book has been released, and of course paperbacks are cheaper than hard covers, but there is something about this book that has "enchanted" me and made me need to have this edition of Nina LaCour's book. It's got the sunglasses that the narrator Colby describes all the girls wearing, the shades being "too big for their faces" and the girl has the rainbow on her shirt, much like the design that Meg gets tattooed on her chest. It's got the summer sun shining through in the top right corner, and the girl with the long blonde hair is how I picture Beth looking in the flashback scenes, before she chops off her hair in the present day, just before hers, Meg's and Colby's last day of high school.

While this book might look on the surface to be a story about four teens out on their own for the first time, touring California with their band, looking to get famous and find out what they're meant to do in life through a humorous sequence of events . . . it's really not like that. For one, you find out pretty early in the story that while the all-girl band made up of Bev, Meg and Alexa, named The Disenchantments, is passionate . . . but they are perhaps lacking in rhythm, among other things. They're far from the most talented musicians around, but playing music and performing is something that is important to them, and so they travel around over the course of a week to various towns and meet a whole myriad of people.

During this, Colby is trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life; he never applied to college, planning instead to tour around Europe with his best friend from childhood Bev for a year. She shocks him by telling him on the first day of their tour that she won't be going with him to Europe and instead will be heading off to college in the fall.

I love this book for a million reasons, and it's difficult to put all of them into words, so I suggest you pick up a copy for yourself. One of these reasons is an idea that this book proves false, and rightly so. The characters in this book play along with the idea that it's easy to come up with these grand ideas, things you want to do that may seem a bit far-fetched, and while people may say that they're going to do these things, most of the time people go in knowing that these amazing things they want to do will never happen. At one point in the story, Colby is the one who is told upfront about this anomaly, and decides not to accept, and instead realized that if you really, really want something to happen, the only things in your way from making your ideas a reality is you, and you can always overcome that obstacle if you've got half a mind to. It just involves never giving up on your dreams and those far-fetched ideas brewing in your head.

So pick up this book if you'd like an enlightening, funny, uplifting summer read.