Why did I love this book?
This book tells the dead-on truth about what it feels like to be a kid who can’t find a single place in the world where he feels like he belongs. I love, love, love James Sveck’s smart, funny, cynical voice and how it made me laugh and cry—sometimes simultaneously. I love how this book shows that even young people with every advantage can be lonely, unhappy, and unseen, too, and that, like everyone else, they have to make themselves vulnerable to change that is going to be painful. But that sounds so—ugh, what adults are always saying to kids. The truth is, I love this book because it’s honest and hilarious and I came to the end feeling like I knew James and had a real stake in his getting his act together.
2 authors picked Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 14, 15, 16, and 17.
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is the story of James Sveck, a sophisticated, vulnerable young man with a deep appreciation for the world and no idea how to live in it. James is eighteen, the child of divorced parents living in Manhattan. Articulate, sensitive, and cynical, he rejects all of the assumptions that govern the adult world around him–including the expectation that he will go to college in the fall. He would prefer to move to an old house in a small town somewhere in the Midwest. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You takes place…