REVIEW: "Together, Apart" by a collection of established YA authors
The world is constantly changing.
And an inarguable byproduct of this continual change is the fact that each generation has a different coming of age experience.
My formative experience, for example, was absolutely influenced by the explosion of technology that occurred during my youth. When I was born in 1982 Betamax players were only kind of a thing and by the time I graduated high school in 2001 I had internet in my home — granted, it was dial-up.
The thing with this change, though, was that it was gradual. Piece by piece, technology by technology, the world in which I lived evolved. Sure, looking back on 1982 from 2001 you could see that the world was very different than it used to be, but because it was gradual it was never really a shock to the system.
There wasn’t one point past which everything was different.
And, honestly, the changes I lived through weren’t even really unexpected.
Yes, the trajectory of technological development had steepened, but it wasn’t a jump.
It wasn't like this pandemic, which came along out of nowhere and, seemingly overnight, changed all of our lives, especially the lives of adolescents.
The almost-adults in our midst were still learning how to navigate the world we had when everything changed.
It has yet to be seen what impact this pandemic will have on who the adolescents of today become, but we can already see the short term effects all around us.
And it is these short term effects that are captured in this anthology of pandemic-set tales of young love.
This collection of short stories features a diverse array of original works penned by well-established young adult authors. The only thread connecting them was the fact that they all were set in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
To my delight, both as a collection and as individual stories, Together, Apart worked.
The fact that each tale was separate and distinct allowed for the stories that filled this anthology to be as diverse as the unique experiences we all had during this unprecedented time.
Each author brought his or her own flavor to the literary exploration of what it’s like to live through this — hopefully — once in a lifetime occurrence. And I think this made this anthology feel more realistic. More representative of not just one subsection of teen, but of all of the adolescents that fill this varied and vast country. This diverse and complex world. All of the teens whose lives were changed, in one way or another, by this need to stay apart when they feel that hard-to-resist the adolescent drive to be together.
Representation in general was a definite strength of this book. Not only did the anthology include depictions of teens in different types of communities — urban and suburban and rural — it also contained robust representations of various sexual orientations and cultures.
This representation is beneficial in two ways. First, it ensures that nearly any teen who reads this anthology can find someone in it with whom to relate. And second, it exposes adolescent readers to the lives and experiences of those who are wholly dissimilar to them.
It is honestly a feat that they were able to get these stories written, and get this book out, in the midst of a now-nearly-year-fucking-long pandemic. But I am so glad they did. Because I feel like these stories resonate more now than they would in a year or so.
In fact, the timing of this book’s release created another really interesting facet of reading this novel. Reading it now, it feels almost as if these stories provide a window back in time. Written, as they presumably were, at the start of this pandemic, these stories allow you to see how much things have changed.
Reading them made me realize that, even in what has been an incredibly sudden disruption, we've experienced incremental changes.
We've learned how to cope with our new normal.
We learned how to be together, yet apart.
And that is really something of which we should be proud.
One of the best, if not the best, young adult anthologies I have ever had the pleasure of reading, Together, Apart earns 5 out of 5 cocktails.
While each and every one of the stories in this anthology had strengths in their own right, my absolute favorite was The Socially Distant Dog-Walking Brigade. Have you read this anthology? If so, which of the stories most spoke to you?
Time for another read. Picking my next read is one of my favorite things. Want to see what I decide on? Subscribe to updates in the sidebar on the right and follow me on Goodreads.
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