Welcome aboard the Paper Frontiers.
This is Bradbury, and I'll be your reviewer for this evening. On tonight's flight plan we'll be taking you across Holly Goldberg Sloan's debut novel, I'll Be There.
Please fasten your seat belts, and enjoy the ride.
I'll Be There
By: Holly Goldberg Sloan
Publish Date: 05/17/2011, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Sam Border wishes he could escape. Raised by an unstable father, he's spent his life moving from place to place. But he could never abandon his little brother, Riddle.
Riddle Border doesn't talk much. Instead, he draws pictures of the insides of things and waits for the day when the outsides of things will make sense. He worships his older brother. But how can they leave when there's nowhere to go? Then everything changes. Because Sam meets Emily.
Emily Bell believes in destiny. She sings for her church choir, though she doesn't have a particularly good voice. Nothing, she feels, is mere coincidence. And she's singing at the moment she first sees Sam.
Everyone whose path you cross in life has the power to change you—sometimes in small ways, and sometimes in ways greater than you could have ever known. Beautifully written and emotionally profound, Holly Goldberg Sloan's debut novel deftly explores the idea of human connection.
I'll start off by saying this: I'll Be There has an amazingly beautiful cover. And c'mon, we all judge a book by its cover, right? Right.
I'll Be There is told in third person omniscient, and that may work better for some people than others. For me it felt like someone was telling me the story rather than showing me. And that actually works as a double-edged sword.
On the one hand you have a book that sounds like a fairy tale, like your grandma telling you how her parents met and fell in love (and I mean that in the most non-boring way). You get taken away by your narrator, Sloan, in beautiful story-telling.
But on the other, there are times when you feel distant from the characters. You don't know exactly why Emily and Sam start liking each other but you're forced to accept that they've fallen in love within a few pages worth of time, because you're told that they did. You're told that they talk, but not too sure what they said. You're told that the relationships in the story are the way that they are (like Bobby Ellis, a side character, liking Emily) but not sure why.
But one way or another, you'll find yourself in love with the characters. When you begin to empathize with Emily's heartache or Sam and Riddle's brotherly bond, you earnestly want that perfect ending for the trio.
The only big down-side that I can think of is at the end, where you're taken through Bobby Ellis's horrible prom date preparations. It's not that the scenes are boring but rather they feel like fillers, keeping you from the ending of the book and finding out what happens to the characters you really care about. I honestly skipped over those last few scenes of Bobby Ellis and it didn't seem to harm the plot.
I'll Be There is a great read, and I recommend it for those who wouldn't mind a calm, easy-going story. Well, you may get a little surprise at the end of the book, but you'll have to read to find out. Personally I could imagine this doing really well as a movie, maybe even better than a book, but it's still a great read nonetheless.
Paper Frontiers gives I'll Be There a 4 out of 5.
The book is a charming, modern-day fairy tale with characters that last in your heart.
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