I have to say, I found a lot of Hello (From Here) stereotypical YA. You've got your dead parent and your absent parent and your financially strapped parent and your illnesses (though they were interesting ones) and your magical old person and your dog. However, the pandemic setting made everything, if not actually new again, at least more interesting.
Now that dealing with the pandemic (and I am one of those who still deals with it) has become somewhat boring and less restricting, it's already easy to forget the stress and fear of the early days. We're talking about something that happened only two and a half years ago and is still going on to some degree. And, yet, Baker and King's book almost seems like a historical novel. That's not a complaint. Their book, I think, reflects the incredible speed of what has been happening.
This is a case of a unique setting and two lead characters who are realistic and intelligent about what's going on around them giving new life to an old situation.
4 comments:
I've seen several, from Walters' Don't Stand So Close to Me to Yang's New From Here to Sherwood's weirdly NOT pandemic The Ice House which definitely had a pandemic feel. I'm not sure that my students are super interested in reading about it, but I have gotten a few for historical purposes.
Yes, this does seem historical!
I first ran across pandemic talk in Yusuf Azeem Is Not a Hero, by Saadia Faruqi, published in 2021. She must have crammed that in during edits. I think for me normalizing people wearing masks at school is as far as I want to go -- because I'm fairly certain masks are here to stay, and only the disease will change. Polio, too, has an airborne droplet vector, after all...
Hello (from here) was a 2021 book, also. I saw objections to it at Goodreads, because people didn't want to read about the pandemic, they thought it was too soon.
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