Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World
Ratings12
Average rating4.3
This was honestly just such a touching book. I kept on thinking about how much this would mean to a thirteen year old going through the same exact things as Ivy. It was a quick and engaging story that almost made me cry a couple of times.
Wow...I never thought I'd love a middle grade book as much as I loved this one. Definitely one my 11 year old daughter needs to read. I just loved how real Ivy's emotions were in this story. What a beautiful picture of a middle school girl figuring out who she is in the mist of a tragedy. This book made me smile, cry, and just love.
Do lgbt kids really read these books or is it just for us lgbt adults to coo over I wonder.
5 stars I wish I had a Robin growing up. This book completely wrecked me; broke my heart and put it back together. Ivy totally reminded me of the 12 years old version of myself. The story, the characters, everything about this book is precious and beautiful. “It was all boys with girls, girls with boys. How was Ivy supposed to know how to handle all these feelings for June, all these feelings at all, if everything she saw and read about and heard about was all boy-girl, girl-boy?”
I have a niece and nephew who are both three, born just days apart from each other. When they were tiny and wriggling and screaming because that's all they could do, we would tell our siblings (their parents) that being a baby is hard. When they started walking and talking, and started saying no to absolutely everything, we told our siblings that toddlering must be hard. Now, of course, being three is hard - having their worlds turned upside down now that their own siblings are entering the picture.
As I closed Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World, I thought, being a tween is hard. Then I started wondering if there's ever an age or era that's not hard. I think we survive by getting through what seems hard, and imagining that it must all be smooth sailing from here on out, avoiding thinking about hardship unless we're actively dealing with it.
Twelve-year-old Ivy deals with a lot of hardship and identity crises in this middle-grade read — in the early pages, her home is destroyed when a tornado tears through her town, she and her family (including her older sister and twin newborn brothers) are displaced into a single hotel room while they figure out their next move, and Ivy's trying to figure out if she likes girls, navigating a potential first crush and worrying that it would ruin her relationships with her friends and sister if they knew. It's a lot.
It's a gorgeously written book, with Ivy's love of drawing bleeding from every interaction, and lots of wonderful, and wonderfully human, characters. Just lovely.