New Providence Memorial Library's Online Reading Group discussion

We are trying another group read during the month of February. The book is A Mango-shaped Space by Wendy Mass. Once again, the Thursday AM Book Club is reading it and they meet in person to discuss on Thursday, 2/20 @ 10AM. We will be discussing it here all month and I invite you to join in at any point.

There are copies at the Circ desk if you'd like to check one out. Or you can head to Chatham, Madison or Mountainside and check out their copies.

Today is the perfect day to stay home and read! I'm sitting in the library reading, tho. So far, I'm up to chapter 4. The book is a quick read and goes down painlessly.

The main character, Mia, is a 13-year old girl who loves the outdoors, her cat, painting and her grandfather. And she sees the world in color. This makes school, particularly Spanish and Math class, difficult for her because she sees things in color.

From the GoodReads reviews I've read, people with synesthesia didn't really think this portrayal was accurate. Mia's condition seems to be much more accute that most. I have heard of people seeing different music keys in colors and feeling color associated with numbers but not to the extent of having problems with algebra. Does anybody out there have experience with this condition who could comment on Wendy Mass's portrayal of this?

Anybody out there reading today? I am up to the final 50 pages and thought I'd take a break to review so far.

Once again, the book is a quick read and it's sometimes easy to see Ms. Mass pulling the strings and delivering a message. For instance, when she describes her visit to the therapist's office and encounters the "middle child sydnrome" for the first time. I found it hard to believe that a girl exposed to Kandinsky, yoga, astrology and superstitions as well as a lot of teasing, would never have heard of middle child syndrome before.

And of course, there's a bit of the "adults just don't understand" view w/ the therapist asking her about drugs and telling her mother that she has a brain tumor.

On the other hand, Mia is lucky to have such cool parents that give her space and recognize that she is coming to terms w/ more than just the news that she has a recognizable condition. It's part of her identity and she is coming to terms w/ who she is.

Her best friend to this point, Jenna, seems headed for a different direction. The rift between them is widening as there is something that Jenna can never share and she can't get over that breach of trust of Mia not telling her about the condition. And of course, Mia is making new friends and new connections among the synesthetes. It seems as if Mass is using this condition as the catalyst to tell the familiar story of a young person finding themself and starting to break out of their shell.

I have to admit, tho, that Adam is a bit creepy. I have a feeling that he will turn out to be not what she expected. And he sounds a bit like a juvenile delinquent what w/ suggesting the earache as an excuse for going to acupuncture, encouraging her to sneak around and offering to get her a fake doctor's note. And I wonder if 13 YOs would get into the "what do you look like" thing so quickly esp. since this is the 1st boy she's emailed before. Anybody out there w/ personal experience on that question?

Finally, the way that Mia describes sitting in the bathtub and seeing the streaking blobs and the description of knowing when a piano was out of tune b/c the colors were wrong make me really envy anybody whose brain does not edit out the extra sensory connections.

Just an FYI--my comment has spoilers.

I just finished A Mango Shaped Space, and I enjoyed it. Overall, I really envy people with synesthesia. I've never met anyone with it, although I'm sure people with this condition would be very reluctant to admit it (until now, of course.) I loved the plot element of her grandfather living on in Mango and felt emotional when Mango died. I also felt the character's devastation when temporarily losing her ability.

Overall, a good story and good read.

The end was rather emotional and a nice twist on the "circle of Life" theme by having Mia find her next cat w/ a background at the party.

I've been looking around the web and found an interesting but totally unrelated fact. It turns out that Vladimir Nabokov and his wife and son were synesthetes and so was Lolita. And many other of his characters. So Wendy Mass is perhaps the first to translate this into a YA format but certainly not the first to feature a character.

As for people w/ the condition reluctant to admit it, maybe it's just more that they don't realize that everybody doesn't think that way. Mia expresses this in the book and I find it to be true in real life. I only found out a few years ago in an off-hand way that my husband has a mild case. He sees numbers in colors but only when he really thinks about it and only for single digit numbers. He didn't think there was anything unique about that until he mentioned it to me - "well 2 is yellow, right" - and I had no idea what he was talking about. So, you may know somebody afterall. I just takes the right circumstances to bring it out.