Ask the passengers

Ask the Passengers Review

  Summary from goodreads:

Astrid Jones desperately wants to confide in someone, but her mother's pushiness and her father's lack of interest tell her they're the last people she can trust. Instead, Astrid spends hours lying on the backyard picnic table watching airplanes fly overhead. She doesn't know the passengers inside, but they're the only people who won't judge her when she asks them her most personal questions . . . like what it means that she's falling in love with a girl.

 Astrid is one of those characters that I would really    love to be friends with. She’s just so intelligent and such an interesting person. Her ideas are brilliant and she tries to share them with her family and her friends but they don’t really care. I personally think that her friends don’t really deserve her friendship, and it would have been nice if she had made friends with the guy in her Humanities class, Clay.  I think towards the end of the novel, her friends    take more of an interest in her and listened to what she had to say, which was nice.

The other characters were really interesting   every time   Astrid talked with her mom, I wanted to go into the book and kill the mom because she was such a hypocrite. Even in the end, her mom wasn’t really accepting of her. Another  character I found really interesting was Astrid's  dad, because  you could tell that he was a good person, who liked  to  spend time with  Astrid and build  birdhouses, but to escape everything he smoked  pot and got stoned. So whatever he said to Astrid, she didn’t believe because he was stoned. I think that if we wasn’t stoned, he would be a really great   father.

  I found that some characters such as Christina and Astrid’s  girlfriend, Dee were kind of under-developed. For almost the entire book I really dislike  Dee, but   when Astrid came out, she became more agreeable. I didn’t really get   Astrid’s friendship with Christiana, it just felt kind of odd to me  and there wasn’t really  any explanation to how they became friends, and why  Christiana trusted  Astrid  so much to keep her secret.  It would have been nice, if we could have gotten to know her a little bit better.

  One thing that I really liked was Astrid’s humanities class and how fun it seemed! I   would totally take part in a class like that, if there was one at my school. One thing  I found   really funny was how  Astrid took  Socrates and gave him  a first name so he could be more relatable and how he helped her  get through certain things. The Socrates Project towards the end of the book sounded so fun. I loved into it, Astrid was. You can really tell that philosophy   became the one thing she   was really into, and I could totally picture her teaching it or something like that.

One thing that made this book really special was how A.S King incorporated magical realism into the story. When Astrid sends her love to the airplanes, the people in the airplanes receive it. The author shows us how a couple of the passengers receive it and how it affects   them. I especially love the last person she sends love to because the passenger needs her love to be safe so she sends her love down so someone can keep it safe for her.  If it wasn’t for the magical realism, the book wouldn’t be as special.

 Overall I really   loved this book, and I gave it a 4/5 stars on Goodreads