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Eva K

the thing about jellyfish by Ali Benjamin (4/5)

The realistic fiction novel, The Thing About Jellyfish is by Ali Benjamin and was originally published in 2015 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book takes you through an adventure of issues, but it especially emphasizes the themes of friendship and accepting reality even if it is not the best. This novel is basically about a girl named Suzy who feels as though she is the one who is guilty of her best friend Franny's death. Before that, the novel explores the struggles of friends as it takes you on the adventure of how Franny's friendship with Suzy slowly grows distant. Upon entering middle school, Franny starts making new friends, and Suzy's friendship with her slowly disappears even with Suzy trying to stay close to her. Sadness and confusion fill Suzy and as she hears about Franny's death, she hypothesizes that a jellyfish sting was the cause of Franny's death and she goes on to prove her theory even if it meant traveling across the country as a 12-year-old to do so. For me, this book was extremely interesting and I wasn’t able to stop reading after I picked the book up. It was so interesting because the main character who is twelve years old was dealing with problems that an adult would deal with later in life. In addition, I got to see a whole other perspective of a totally different person than me and it was really interesting. I agree with the author that we should always just accept reality no matter how bad it is because if we do not, we will end up in a delusional state just like how Suzy ended up trying to prove Franny's death was not an accident and really a jellyfish caused her death. Honestly, the book really does not arise any problems. Throughout the book, there were signs hinting that the bigger, overall message of this novel was environmental problems, especially ocean pollution. Those hints were engraved with Suzy's problem with control. I would definitely recommend this book to other people, especially those who are interested in jellyfish because the novel contains some facts about jellyfish.

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