Essays for school

Ask the passenger's book review (8th grade?)

Ask the Passengers

A.S. King

The book "ask the passengers" is a story about a girl discovering her own sexuality. You follow her for a few weeks as she discovers many things about her friends, family and herself.

Ask the Passengers was released on October 23, 2012 by Little, Brown and company. The book (not including the acknowledgments) has 293 pages and its genre is young adult fiction.

The story is told in first person (narrated by the main character) and takes place in a small town by the country called Unity Valley. There Astrid must deal with the small-minded people of Unity Valley and all the gossip and rumors they spread about everyone. The protagonist (Astrid Jones) is seventeen years old and goes to highschool where she loves to study philosophy and humanities. From the first few chapters you can see her love for the subject and for thinking about profound new ideas. As you follow her throughout the story it is very interesting to see the way she acts or how she "copes" with everything. For example, multiple times in the books she lies on her picnic table and sends love to passengers on planes. She does this because in her view they are the only people who won't judge her when she asks her deepest questions. She also creates an imaginary friend named Frank Socrates (yes, the actual philosopher with an invented first name) to whom she will sometimes look up to for help or advice.

Then there is Astrid's dysfunctional family. Which includes her dad (who's a pot-head), her overbearing, pushy mother and her sister, who never talks to Astrid unless she needs something. Astrid seems to have accepted the way her family is, but you can sometimes see her disappointment to how things are at home. Before her dad became a pot-smoker he and Astrid were very close, due to the relationship between her and her mother already being ruined. They would spend a lot of time together building bird houses and the one and only picnic table that Astrid spends so much time on. Finally, Ellis, Astrid's younger sister who Astrid describes as being stuck in her own little bubble and not really caring about looking at things through other people's point of view. Ellis is also her mother's favorite child and she is the most doted on. Her mother takes her on "mommy and me nights" were they dress up and go eat somewhere. They just completely ignore Astrid and her father leaving them to have fun.

The story begins with Astrid thinking about what she learned in her humanities class, about how motion is impossible. Justin and Kristina are picking her up, they offer to take her to a restaurant but she can't. When she arrives home you get a first look at her mother (who completely ignores her at first), Ellis and her pot-head dad. You also see Astrid send her love. This is not the first time she sends love, in fact she does this so many times throughout the book that I already lost count. I believe she does this because she wants to give love away on her own terms. Astrid also goes through some character development. I could not see it at first but I realized that she found out who she was and was willing to scream it out loud in her highschool hallway (which got he suspended).

Later on, you find out that Astrid has a girlfriend named Dee. In my personal opinion I do not like Dee. She physically intimidates Astrid and attempts to have sex with her without her consent. I would have preferred that Astrid breaks-up with Dee rather than stay with her, or maybe she could have started a relationship with Kim (whom I personally prefer to over Dee) but Kim was totally dropped from the story and only mentioned again once. It made no sense to me why we never got to see her again, obviously she and Astrid had a connection so why abandon the character?

The story had promise, the subjects it was tackling are very important but the repetition you see in the book is very annoying. I don't know how many times Astrid sends her love but it I started skipping passages the fourth time. The writing wasn't as good as I expected it to be, which was very disappointing but it did the job to describe Astrid's feelings. I believe the book could have been better but I suppose it wasn't terrible.