I have a thing for epistolary novels, and I liked the premise of this one: a college kid, after a fight with his best friend, decides he should avoid fucking up friendships by simply not speaking. He writes notes, instead, and that’s what this book is made up of: notes, e-mails, one-sided conversations in which Jake (the aforementioned college kid) is writing notes and the person he’s conversing with is talking, not writing. It’s filled with charming pen and ink drawings: the patterns that ice skates make on the rink, or the marks that teeth leave on skin, and I love the way that Frank turns these things into a real narrative, a story that says so much without words. I wouldn’t call this a book about elective mutism in quite the same way that E.L. Konigsburg’s Silent to the Bone<\/i > is—this is more a book about college life, being young and negotiating friendships and sex and love, but it’s a quick and (mostly) interesting read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have a thing for epistolary novels, and I liked the premise of this one: a college kid, after a fight with his best friend, decides he should avoid fucking up friendships by simply not speaking. He writes notes, instead, and that’s what this book is made up of: notes, e-mails, one-sided conversations in which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-young-adultchildrens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}