Book talk: Ballads of Suburbia

Summary: Ballads are the kind of songs that Kara McNaughton likes best. Not the cliched ones where a diva hits her highest note or a rock band tones it down a couple of notches for the ladies, but the true ballads: the punk rocker or the country crooner telling the story of their life in three minutes, the chorus reminding their listeners of the numerous ways to screw things up.

In high school, Kara helped maintain the “Stories of Suburbia” notebook, which contained newspaper articles about bizarre and often tragic events from suburbs all over and personal vignettes that Kara dubbed “ballads” written by her friends in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago.

Those “ballads” were heartbreaking honest tales of the moments when life changes and a kid is forced to grow up too soon. But Kara never wrote her own ballad.

Before she could figure out what her song was about, she was leaving town after a series of disastrous events at the end of her junior year. Four years later, Kara returns to face the music, and tells the tale of her first three years of high school with her friends’ “ballads” interspersed throughout.

This book is powerful. It’s been haunting me for days, yes haunting me. After I finished, I couldn’t help but sit there in a daze. The first thing that popped into my head was “WOW.” Granted my emotions were in complete chaos. This isn’t a novel for the faint hearted. This novel is moving, it’s upsetting, it’s heartbreaking, it’s real.

Stephanie Kuehnert has an amazing talent. Even though I haven’t experienced anything like what Kara went through, even though I was so blissfully unaware of the world she lived in, I felt like I did.

And it wasn’t just Kara, all of the characters felt like they could walk right off the pages. And I never judged them and that totally surprised me. I never once thought druggie loser, and I should have.

Which again, comes back to Stephanie’s amazing talent as a writer. To take something that I always thought was black and white and turn it into something grey.I’m still in awe days later.

Thank you Stephanie for telling this story. I can’t wait to see what you have in store for us next.