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    Althea & Oliver
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    Althea & Oliver
    Unavailable
    Althea & Oliver
    Audiobook11 hours

    Althea & Oliver

    Written by Cristina Moracho

    Narrated by Jorjeana Marie

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    What if you live for the moment when life goes off the rails-and then one day there's no one left to help you get it back on track?
     
    Althea Carter and Oliver McKinley have been best friends since they were six; she's the fist-fighting instigator to his peacemaker, the artist whose vision balances his scientific bent. Now, as their junior year of high school comes to a close, Althea has begun to want something more than just best-friendship. Oliver, for his part, simply wants life to go back to normal, but when he wakes up one morning with no memory of the past three weeks, he can't deny any longer that something is seriously wrong with him. And then Althea makes the worst bad decision ever, and her relationship with Oliver is shattered. He leaves town for a clinical study in New York, resolving to repair whatever is broken in his brain, while she gets into her battered Camry and drives up the coast after him, determined to make up for what she's done.

    Their journey will take them from the rooftops, keg parties, and all-ages shows of their North Carolina hometown to the pool halls, punk houses, and hospitals of New York City before they once more stand together and face their chances. Set in the DIY, mix tape, and zine culture of the mid-1990s, Cristina Moracho's whip-smart debut is an achingly real story about identity, illness, and love-and why bad decisions sometimes feel so good.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 9, 2014
    ISBN9780698175914
    Unavailable
    Althea & Oliver
    Author

    Cristina Moracho

    ALTHEA & OLIVER is Cristina Moracho's first novel. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and tweets at @cherielecrivain.

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    Reviews for Althea & Oliver

    3.5/5

    52 ratings6 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 1/5
      This was extremely disappointing. From the start I found Althea immature and selfish, and I never connected with her. Oliver was a much nicer character and I was intrigued by his disease. When Althea wasn't around he was more focused on himself and his condition. However, there was too much language, under-age drinking and smoking of pot for my liking, and as for the 'sex' scene, that was just disturbing. In fact, in my opinion, it was borderline rape.
    • 3/5
      *I received an ARC of this book through the Penguin First To Read Program. All opinions are my own.*

      Althea and Oliver was a quick and engaging read that I burned through in a day. The story was interesting enough that even though I'm not a huge reader of contemporary YA (yet I have read the staples of John Green, Rainbow Rowell, Stephanie Perkins, etc) I still found the book hooking my attention.

      I found there were many great things about this story including a more realistic portrayal of teenage dynamics, not shying away from teenage vices such as drinking and smoking, a focus on friendship, fun settings, an atypical and yet satisfying ending and an overall fantastic writing style. However, I also found that I had hangups with some of the plot elements that continued to bother me once the book was over. Namely the imbalance of how sexual situations were portrayed.

      Getting heavily into spoiler territory, I feel as though the sexual encounter between Oliver and Althea during one of Oliver's episodes was not thoroughly explored enough. I felt like it ended up being brushed over as a misunderstanding rather than examined as a very dark moral gray area. Sure, they do have a big fight about it that leads to their separation and Althea eventually apologizes.... but it just doesn't feel like enough for something that seriously challenges the boundaries of legal consent. I had serious problems with other characters (namely Oliver's fellow study patient Kentucky's) reaction being summed up as 'how dare Oliver be upset that he had sex he doesn't remember with his beautiful best friend'? I really feel that if this situation had the genders reversed a lot more readers would be upset with how it was handled, and yet it will probably get more of a pass because it happened to a male.

      Similarly I had problems with how Coby was treated as a villain for no discernible reason. All the characters including Valerie and Minty Fresh, and seemingly Coby himself, decide that he deserved the rather brutal physical assault that Althea springs on him at school that leaves him with black eyes and a broken nose. What I can't get is why? Sure Coby isn't a model straight laced student, but neither are most of the characters. His crimes apparently include hanging out with Althea and being a friend to her when Oliver goes down for his episodes, generally being rebellious, having slept with multiple girls in the past, and engaging in consensual sex with Althea when she comes to him upset after a fight with Oliver. Somehow this translates into everyone being okay with his physical assault and Althea never even apologizing for it. Yet, in the end we find that Coby even passes on a message, via Oliver, that he forgives Althea for the attack, and yet he's still the bad guy who deserved it?

      I enjoy flawed characters, even unlikable ones, but I did feel like Althea gets away with quite a lot of bad behavior with no real consequences because she's 'troubled and beautiful' as her character base. Her continued insistence that she's not running away from her problems but walking doesn't really seem to ring true when she doesn't actually have to grow up, take accountability, and reconcile her mistakes. Instead the solution is that she ends up living in a kind of bohemian fantasy land full of quirky roommates and will deal with it all later. One of my favorite roommates in the story, Ethan, does call her out on such behavior in several instances (ex. Althea facing no real danger since she has the safety net of a loving financially stable home to fall back on if her boho NY experiment doesn't work out) but it's ultimately left unresolved.

      All of that said, Althea and Oliver was a refreshing YA read because it felt very real in many ways. The teenagers spoke and acted like real teenagers, there was confusion, mistrust and actual problems and things didn't work out perfectly for everyone. Regular readers of this genre WILL definitely enjoy this book and it may even catch the interest of some who normally don't break into contemporary territory.
    • 3/5
      Derivative and band-wagon-jumping. As if Michelle Tea wrote straight fic with a 90s reminiscent lens.
    • 4/5
      It is really funny that the author of this book says in her biography that she makes bad decisions because the two main characters in her debut novel are making some (in my opinion) that may have negative effects later in their lives. The plot revolves around a pair of teenagers - a boy who has a rare disease that causes him to have long bouts of sleep for weeks at a time. The girl is enamored with the boy but he can never bring himself to fully commit in the way she hopes. They are very intriguing characters that are rarely witnesses in young adult books. Well worth reading.
    • 3/5
      Full disclosure: I read this book because of the title. Yeah, that's my name... and when the blurb told me it was about a punk rock girl moving to New York... I was sold.

      Well, it's not, really.
      It's about a girl whose best friend from childhood comes down with a rare and life-changing illness. Althea has to face both the difficult time Oliver is having, and the normal strains and stresses about how relationships - and one's sense of self - change as one grows up.

      Yes, as part of growing up, Althea kinda-sorta runs away and finds new friends and community in New York. Even though she and her new friends weren't really 'punk' (they're more Brooklyn hipsters, really... I felt like I'd been here 10 years by the time things were like the descriptions here, even though the blurb says it's supposed to be the early 1990s) this was by far my favorite part of the book, and yes, it really did have aspects that I could relate to.
      However, that's only the latter part of the book. The larger, first half is all suburban angst and high school drama. It's pretty well done - Althea thinks and acts like a teen, and I found her believable, even though I never had an Oliver that I expected to stay close to for my whole life.

      Oliver's plight, meanwhile... well, when I was a kid I went through a phase of reading books about children who go through awful, horrible things: abuse, fatal illnesses, etc. (It started with Torey Hayden's 'One Child' and expanded...) There's a whole genre of these books. I think the appeal is in the exploration of: what's the worst possible thing that could happen to you?
      But, I'm long over that phase, and Oliver's illness seemed like a very non-severe and watered-down version of the kind of drama to be found in that genre. It was a little interesting to learn about Kleine-Levin Syndrome, but it didn't totally grab me.

      I did, however, really like the ending - I was afraid the book was going to paint itself into a difficult corner, but I thought the resolution was quite satisfying.

      I felt like I wasn't exactly the target audience for this book. If I'd read it at a certain point in time when i was younger, I think it would've resonated a lot more - so I would definitely recommend it to 12-16 year olds, especially rebellious ones.

      Many thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to read a copy of this book.

      As always, my opinions are solely my own.

      PS note on other reviews: I find the number of other reviews that are criticizing Althea for 'raping' Oliver while he was sick kind of odd. Did these readers miss the part where, later, Althea says, "I don't think I could've stopped it"? In his illness, Oliver was very physically sexually aggressive. Yes, she wanted it - but he also physically overcame her. I thought that was a good part of making the incident a convincing emotionally complex event.
      In addition - I think a number of readers are criticizing this as if it were a romance. Yes, there is a lot of hurtful and bad behavior in this book. But at no time does the author glorify people's hurtful actions, or portray them as romantic. People aren't always nice to each other, and a good, insightful novel will recognize this - as this one does.
    • 5/5
      4.5

      So much to say about this when I can gather all my thoughts. All I can say at the moment is God Bless the train-wrecks. I've known so many in my day and walked tiny portions of their path in trepidation.