This Golden State by Marit Weisenberg book review

 

This Golden State by Marit Weisenberg book review 

This golden state by merritt weisenberg is a newer release it came out earlier in 2022 and it's one of the books that like i was researching earlier this year like some of the books that were coming out and i'd read the synopsis of this one and it immediately caught my attention

So in this story you are following this girl named poppy she is 17 and about to turn 18 years old and she is a part of a family that follows five rules no one can know your real name

If you sense that anything's wrong immediately go to the meeting spot don't stay in one place for too long keeping our family together is everything and we wish that we could tell you more about our family 

But we can't so poppy has grown up as a part of this family never knowing who her parents really are she doesn't know what their real full names are she doesn't know anything about their history or their past or anything along those lines she's moved constantly 

She's been in and out of schools and all of this stuff and so at the beginning of the story you see poppy getting pulled from her current school and they are on the move again and they end up in california and california is one of those places where poppy has kind of gotten hints of california being a somewhat important place 

But she doesn't really know why or how and anytime she would suggest like california as one of the spots that they moved to it would immediately get shut down but at this point in the story they have decided that they're going to live in california and while she's there poppy sees on one of the signs at the high school nearby 

That they are doing sort of like a summer stem program and so she ends up enrolling in a type of math class and while she's a part of the math class something comes up that she wants to be a part of 

But her parents say no because the complications of her life make it so it's like very difficult for her to be a part of these sorts of official programs and so poppy gets really upset about this and the next day while she's at her math class she notices that the class after her is a genetics related class 

So they have a bunch of like dna kiss think of like an ancestry.Com sort of dna kit and so she ends up swiping one and then mailing in the dna test in order to figure out who her family is her entire life she's always questioned 

It and things like that but her parents have always just immediately shut it down and refused to answer any questions and of course this begins a series of events and that's about as far as i'll go 

In terms of providing you with a plot summary like i said earlier this was a book that was on my like highly anticipated list because that premise is so fascinating to me but i also had like relatively 

I don't want to say low expectations but i definitely was like managing my expectations going into this book because i also knew it was a young adult contemporary book or like a young adult contemporary mystery mix and you know you never really know how as a 35-year-old 

How you're going to respond to a young adult book but i adored this book it exceeded all of my expectations and was even better than what i expected it to be i'll just say like off the jump like 

This is basically a five-star book for me there is nothing about this book that i would really change i think that this is mostly a contemporary story like 

I feel like this is a book worth having on your radar because i feel like everything in the way this story is constructed is really well done i think the writing is fantastic 

It's not super angsty but there's like the right amount of angst considering the age and the situation that our main character is in there's a little bit of a romance in here but it felt natural and not natural is the right word 

But it if it felt right for the story itself but yeah it's mostly a contemporary story but because there is this like element of like who is poppy's family there's also this really great mystery that's kind of like pushing you through the whole thing 

I feel like if you're someone who really enjoyed the unseen world by liz moore this would also be a really good book to pick up 

Because i feel like it has kind of similar vibes where you have this girl who is coming of age and about you know growing up and things like that and doesn't really know anything about her parent's past 

So the story is basically kind of a reveal of those things and so you do eventually learn like who poppy's parents are and why they've chosen to live this sort of life and the consequences of that

It's a really fantastic look at family dynamics in the story papi has a younger sister who i think is like eight years old and so it's really interesting to see the contrast between the two characters poppy is someone who definitely follows 

The rules and how her younger sister kind of pushes the boundary a little bit how each of them handles the situation that you know is very difficult and also like just sort of having that age gap 

They also just respond to things differently and stuff like that you see poppy coming into her own and starting to have her own way of thinking like she spent her own life following her parent's rules and doing whatever she could to protect her parents 

But now that she's growing up a little bit and especially now that she's like basically finishing high school she has to kind of figure out what's going to happen now at this point yeah i thought this was amazing like 

I thought the pacing was fantastic i wanted to keep reading this book constantly i think poppy as a character is really well done like she's sheltered and it's written in a way that like the things that she knows and things that 

She doesn't know makes sense this book also kind of brought me back to reading educated and obviously, those situations are not exactly the same 

But i feel like they also have similar vibes because you have this young woman who loves this extremely sheltered life and like her desire for like education and wanting to know more and be more and do more with her life and stuff like that like those sorts of vibes are there as well this is a book 

I know for a fact is not getting a lot of eyeballs on it and definitely not as many as i think it deserves 

So i'm really glad that i just happened to stumble upon it when i was looking up books that were coming out this year because this again just exceeded my expectations 

It provides like this really interesting point of view on like living this extremely sheltered life but also like at the same time i feel like a lot of people go through this as they grow up like coming into your own and seeing sort of the ways that your parents have raised you 

You know the mistakes that they made but also at the same time recognizing that they were trying to do their best with what they had in front of them and kind of coming to terms with your family 

Your family history and things like that and sort of trying to reconcile battle to like what you want to be doing with your life and things like that 

So i feel like this is like just the perfect encapsulation of a coming-of-age story yeah i feel like i could just like sit here and talk about all the different aspects of this book that i really enjoyed 

But you know i i don't think that'll necessarily do more to convince you other than me just saying i really really enjoyed this book also fun little fact just for me personally the male love interest i guess you could say in this book 

They don't specify for most of the book his ethnicity but then at some point they decide to and he's like half milly alley which blew my mind because how often do you see molly alleys in books my parents are from kerala 

In case i wasn't clear and so that was a fun little tidbit for me that you know maybe pushed me over the edge to make this five-star book 

It didn't this is this book is amazing even without that detail but yeah that was just like a fun little treat for me so i just thought i would mention that so yes 

If i could you know use this review or use this little platform to bring more attention to this book i cannot explain to you like how much i love this book i honestly thought it was fantastically done the reveals in here are perfectly paced.

 THANK YOU SO MUCH