{Synopsis} – To Find Your Future, You Have to Face Your Past
At sixteen, Morgan Lindstrum has the life that every other girl wants–at least from the outside. A privileged only child, she has everything she could ever want, except her parents' attention. A Princeton physicist and a high-powered executive, they barely have any time for each other, much less for Morgan. Then her beloved grandfather dies, depriving Morgan of the only stable figure in her life. If that's not enough, she suddenly finds out he was never her grandfather at all. To find out the truth about her family, Morgan makes her way to Brooklyn, where she meets Terence Mulvaney, the Irish immigrant father who her mother disowned. Morgan wants answers; but instead of just satisfying her curiosity, Mulvaney shows her the people in his condemned tenement building, who are suffering and have nowhere to go. He challenges her to help them, by tearing away the veil of shame, and showing her wealthy parents and her advantaged circle of friends a world they don't want to know exists. The temptation to walk away from this ugly reality, as her mother did, is strong. But if she does, can Morgan ever really leave behind what she learned when she crossed into Brooklyn?
{My Thoughts} – Morgan is a teenage girl that has lived in a family that has given her a cushy life. They have provided for her, made her feel safe, protected her and did what they thought was right for her.
Morgan soon finds out that her nice life, it isn’t what she had grown to believe is true. She learns that her family has been keeping a bunch of secrets when it comes to her mother’s family. She learns that there is so much going on within her house that she is having a hard time figuring out what is real, what isn’t real, who is real, who isn’t real and how she is suppose to feel about it all in the end.
Eventually she takes matters into her own hands. She tries to find out what everyone has been hiding from her.
I appreciate Morgan’s character in this book to an extent. I found her to be an overly opinionated, life isn’t fair, why does no one tell me the truth person. I didn’t like her constant whining throughout the book, I didn’t enjoy that she thought she had the right to insert herself into her parents business. I don’t think she had the right to act like her life was coming to an end, because her parents didn’t share hurtful information from her past with her. I also didn’t think she was a smart character for traveling from New Jersey to Brooklyn alone to meet people she didn’t know from Adam and was warned by bother her parents weren’t good in the past. I personally had I been her parent would have grounded her until her graduation.
There were some good points in the book. She had a nice friendship with her two best friends. She had supportive parents beside the fact that she constantly did as she pleased. She also did a great justice for some individuals that she hardly knew. It showed that she had the ability to be self less in a sense, but she had a poor way of coming to that realization.
If I were to recommend this book, I would only push it for those individuals that just need a light story to read. Those individuals that need to understand that life isn’t always fair and sometimes your parents only do the things they do in order to protect you from the things they know may hurt you in the long run. There is so much that can be learned from this book, but a lot of the main points were glossed over, so it’s hard to really sit here and determine what is good and what is bad.
Final Conclusion: 4 Star Rating.
