Crawling Over the Pages: Book Review: The Sea of Tranquility

Full of rage and without a purpose, former pianist Nastya Kashnikov wants two things: to get through high school without anyone discovering her past and to make the boy who took everything from her pay.

All 17 year-old Josh Bennett wants is to build furniture and be left alone, and everyone allows it because it’s easier to pretend he doesn’t exist. When your name is synonymous with death, everyone tends to give you your space.

Everyone except Nastya, a hot mess of a girl who starts showing up and won’t go away until she’s insinuated herself into every aspect of his life. The more he gets to know her, the more of a mystery she becomes. As their relationship intensifies and the unanswered questions begin to pile up, he starts to wonder if he may ever learn the secrets she’s been hiding or if he even wants to.

Upon reading the prologue, I was instantly hooked with this book. I was a little hesitant with it but the positive reviews lifted my mood and thank God for all the readers who posted their opinions about it. It certainly exceeded my expectations.

If you're looking for a mushy mushy young adult book that would make you giggle and swoon, you should not read this book. Yes it sure has the mushy stuff but that's just an icing to the cake. This book deals with some serious issues like post traumatic stress disorder, bullying, panic attack, and murder.

This is perhaps one of the best books I've read this year. It was well-written. As a reader, I can feel what the character feels. I got to read the point of views of Nastya and Josh. Teenagers really relate to the bullying. Josh Bennett brought out the fangirl in me. I couldn't help t! I love the book because it did not only entertain me, it was also able to address issues that those in authority needed to focus onto.

Nastya Kashnikov.

I don't know what to make to her character. All the anger that she should have relieved was pent up inside her. She was suffering from PTSD and as such, she should have cooperated with her doctors but instead she kept her feelings to herself. What she thought as grief for what she had suffered turned out to be self-pity. And through the years, it had eaten her. Her left hand was fixed but it could never do the thing she was born to do. She became a social outcast. She dressed in outrageously revealing clothes so the stares would be diverted from staring at her scarred hand. I can't totally explain her but I felt her agony and her pain trying to live everyday when just the idea of waking up after a nightmare was difficult enough. Here are some of her feelings expressed through words formed in her head.

Josh Bennett.He is also a social outcast just like Nastya. He may not have suffered physically like her but he had also undergone an emotional suffering through the years. He had lost his mother and her sister in a car accident and his father though still alive was not emotionally there when he grew up. Years after, his dad gave up and died. He became a social pariah. He always finds a reason to fight and the people who know him always let him go. He found solace when he met Nastya. There are some characters you just couldn't forget and one of them is this guy. I love him. He's very understanding and patient toward Nastya. I'm just glad he didn't gave up on her.

Drew. He's adorable. He maybe tough outside but inside he's like a gooey marshmallow. He's been stereotyped as a womanizer and a partier but those were only a font.

Clay. He's an artist who also belongs to the social outcast. While doing his sketching at his hiding place, he met Nastya. They became friends and he informed her of all the possible hiding place for her at school.

These three guys are very protective of Nastya and she found peace when she was with them. They seem to understand her even though she's not very communicative with them.

Even though I wanted to get angry with the one who murdered her, I also have some reservations. The guy was emotionally unstable when he saw her and Nastya's luck left her when he found her. Though I still feel devastated because it shouldn't have happened in the first place. Most of the time, I'm mad at they guy. I was touched when "Emilia" wrote that statement for the court. I can't help but shed a tear. The letter was simply devastating because whether the guy wasn't in the right mind when he did the crime, Emilia's life was forever changed.

"My name is Emilia Ward. I have a list of nevers. I started wgeb U was fifteen. I will never be the Brighton Piano Girl again. I will never carry a child. I will never walk down the street in the middle of the afternoon without wondering if someone is waiting to kill me. I will never get back the months of my life that I spent in rehabilitation and in and out of hospitals, instead of in recitals and in and out of school. I will never get back the years I spent hating every last person in the world, including myself. I will never not know the meaning of the word pain. I understand pain. I understand rage. Aidan Richter gave me the gift of understanding. He understands it, too. I spent the past three years despising the person who did this to me; the person who stole my life and took my identity. I learned to despise myself in the process. I spent the last three years fortifying my rage, while he spent the last three years healing his. I will never forget what he did to me. I will never forgive it. I will never stop hating him. Please don't ask me to. I wish I could say that I am a big enough person; but I'm not. I will never stop mourning what he stole from me. But I can't steal it back from him and I don't want to anymore. I think maybe I can believe in spite of Aidan Richter; or maybe I can believe because of him. If he can heal his life, then maybe I can, too. I can't tell you what I believe is the appropriate punishment for him. I just don't know. But I would like to believe in the dream of second chances. For both of us."

"Sometimes it's easier to pretend nothing is wrong than to face the fact that everything is wrong, but you're powerless to do anything about it."

"I'd also believe that all teenage boys go around calling girls baby, because apparently that's the express train to romance."

"People like to say love is unconditional, but it's not, and even if it was unconditional, it's still never free. There's always an expectation attached. They always want something in return. Like they want you to be happy or whatever that makes you automatically responsible for their happiness because they won't be happy unless you are. You're supposed to be who they think you're supposed to be and feel how they think you're supposed to feel because they love you and when you can't give them what they want, they feel shitty, so you feel shitty, and everybody feels shitty. I just don't want that responsibility."

"You get halfway through with your life and you realize you haven't done the things you wanted to do or become what you'd thought you'd become and it's disheartening."

"People who go around advertising their birthday are douche bags. It's a fact. You can look it up on Wikipedia."

"I wished my mother was here tonight, which is stupid, because it's an impossible wish." He shrugs and turns to me, drowning the smile that cracks me every time. "It's not stupid to want to see her again." "It wasn't so much that I wanted to see her again," he says, looking at me with the depth of more than seventeen years in his eyes. "I wanted her to see you."

"Girls always want to change the rules in the middle of the game."

"The world should be full of Josh Bennetts. But it's not. I had the only one."