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Today, Fable and the Verbivore are sharing our February book club episode on the funny, endearing, and hopeful Opposite of Always by Justin A. Reynolds.

This book opens with high school senior Jack King sharing a couple of lessons he’s learned while stuck in a time loop as he attempts to save the life of someone he cares about. Then we go back with him to when it all began - witnessing all the circumstances that bring him to this place, the relationships in his orbit, and the choices he’s made as he tries to change the way the story ends.

In this episode, we discuss the many lessons that this book taught us. For example:

• That a story can be funny, heartwarming, heartbreaking, edge-of-your-seat exciting, and thoughtful. But it can’t be all those things all at once, space needs to be given to allow the different emotions to land and breath.

• Showing relationship growth in a variety of ways. Taking time to let the dynamics take shape through character dialogue and e-mail conversations. Allowing someone to stumble upon a close secret of another character and seeing how they respond. Showing development by changes in the levels of trust and willingness to share vulnerable things.

• That sometimes in speculative fiction, you don’t need to know the mechanism for how the strange/unexpected things work. But that it’s good to be able to connect with the why in terms of its significance within the story - the impetus that’s causing the phenomenon, rather than how it’s achieved.

If it’s not already evident, we both strongly connected with this book. It has complex and lovable characters and character relationships, witty dialogue, and hidden gems of human wisdom sprinkled throughout. It also has a premise that to us seems like it would have been really difficult to pull off but feels effortless in author Justin A. Reynolds hands.

We hope you enjoy this episode and would highly recommend checking this book out! Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

“Justin A. Reynolds is the author of Opposite of Always, Early Departures, and the upcoming Miles Morales: Shock Waves. His debut novel [Opposite of Always] published by Katherine Tegen Books was an Indies Introduce selection, a School Library Journal Best Book, has been translated in seventeen languages, and is being developed for film with Paramount Players. Justin is also the co-founder of the CLE Reads Book Festival, a Cleveland Book Festival for middle-grade and young adult writers, which he launched in July 2019. You can find him at justinareynolds.com.” - Amazon.com

Justin is on social media at Twitter @andthisjustin, Instagram @justinwritesya, and Facebook @justinwritesya.

Names are important, even character names. The Verbivore mistakenly calls Jack King’s friend Juliet, her name is Jillian.

Books & Movies Mentioned:

• Opposite of Always by Justin A. Reynolds

• Groundhog Day, Directed by Harold Ramis

• Sliding Doors, Directed by Peter Howitt

Music from: https://filmmusic.io
’Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)