This Week’s Peanut Gallery

I was fortunate to have two great books to read and select from. I thoroughly enjoyed both.

M.T. Anderson’s Symphony for the City of the Dead, while not my selection, is an impeccably researched and accounted story of composer Dmitri Shostakovich, and an essential record of art in a time of war. Anderson brings life to Shostakovich’s struggles, those of the people of Leningrad, all wrapped in a detailed and compelling portrait of World War II.

My selected book, Noelle Stevenson’s Nimona, is the enchanting tale of shape-shifting villain in training Nimona, and her one armed, noble, villain mentor, Ballister Blackheart. Stevenson combines classic fairytale story stuff, jousts and brave knights in shiny golden armor, seamlessly with modern superhero twists, like an evil corporate institutions with evil corporate plans to infect the village’s food supply, in a mix that is as satisfying as a perfect softee swirl on a summer day.

This book is funny: funny like slapstick, funny like your best friend in grade 10 (who hates Zombie movies but forces you to watch them), funny in a way that is self aware (“Hold up there villain! We’ve got to fight because that’s my job!”), while remaining sincere.

Stevenson’s illustrations swell with personality and expressive gestures, with evil grins and exuberant victory dances. Her characters are stiff and noble, loose and goofy, larger than life and entirely human.

Nimona is a story about the power to transform, to become anything your imagination can dream up. The main character, Nimona, can shape shift into any creature she can think of (dragon, rat, little kid, kitten, shark).   With the ability to be as big and bad as she wants to be, Nimona is determined to use her powers to become a great villain. On the flip side, Nimona’s reluctant mentor Ballister Blackheart, is a villain because the Institution made him one (as opposed to golden boy Sir Ambrosius Goldenloin – who clearly has the name to be the good guy). In different ways, almost all of Stevenson’s characters are boxed in by the conventions, forced to be good or bad. Fortunately in Nimona, destiny may dictate your character, but it doesn’t have to control your actions. Being cast in a limited role doesn’t mean you can’t fight back against the Institution, or for your friends.

One of the great achievements of Nimona is that it is a hero story with feelings. It’s a story about being a hero, but it’s also about fear, anger, grief and joy. It’s a story not just about the victoriousness of defeating your enemy, but the frustration of feeling deserted by the people you trusted. It’s about being a little kid and a big bad dragon, about feeling powerful and vulnerable all at once.

Overall Nimona is a joy to read, a modern day Paper Bag Princess superhero, full of heart and soul.

–Mariko Tamaki

The hardest match of them all. Why can’t both these books just parachute to the Final Round? Nimona can survive anything, after all, and Shostakovich’s music is immortal, too – and he survived Stalin. I mean, really. Now, I love Nimona, would’ve been happy with either book, and appreciate Tamaki’s ideas about the various conventions that bind Blackheart and Goldenloin, and how Nimona herself breaks all convention. But Symphony was not given its due in this decision and write-up. As Anderson so touchingly details, Shostakovich is also bound by convention – at first. But as Russia gets under an increasingly tight noose, the composer stands for all that is complicated and profound, dissonant and harmonic. Shostakovich was a real-world hero, if there ever can be one. Even if he acquiesced to Soviet authorities at times, none of us can realize the enormity of living in not an evil corporate institution but a brutal totalitarian one. We read along through the darkness of 20th century Russian history guided by M. T. Anderson’s achingly beautiful language and exhaustive research. He doesn’t go easy on us, either; we read about starvation and cannibalism along with music. Here we have some extremes of human experience, something almost unfathomable, that Anderson begins to make palpable. But to really supplement the book you need to listen to Shostakovich, where the visceral emotion comes through. The very air of Symphony for the City of the Dead is, as Anderson once describes the streets of Leningrad, “filled with a deadening mist. It smelled of ham and butter.”

– Kid Commentator RGN

NIMONA WILL MOVE ON TO ROUND 3

My eleven-year-old son is the gatekeeper of all middle-grade books entering our apartment and so, when The Marvels by Brian Selznick and The Nest by Kenneth Oppel, arrived in the mail, he snatched them up and read them before I could get a glimpse. “The Nest is creepy and awesome,” he said the following morning. And The Marvels? “So good. So sad. You’ll want to cry in the first hundred pages.”

I like “creepy and awesome” if it doesn’t happen when I’m on a camping trip and I love a solid cry if it doesn’t have to do with my own life. So I went into The Nest and The Marvels with high hopes, and I was not disappointed.

Four things about The Marvels that made it awesome:

1. Brian Selznick’s illustrations. The first nearly four-hundred pages of The Marvels feature Selznick’s stunning pencil sketches that are so soulful and awe-inspiring that I felt like I was IN the drawing. Yet while they are pulling in the viewer, they are also causing the viewer to step back and, a-hem, marvel at Selznick’s extraordinary artistic talent and his ability to move a story forward through pictures and a few carefully chosen words.
2. The Marvels! Not the title but the theater family. We meet the Marvels through illustrations at the beginning of the story, in 1766, when two brothers are washed ashore after a shipwreck. One brother dies (enter a solid cry here, around page 100). The surviving brother, Billy Marvel, moves to London and joins the theater world. Billy spawns several generations of talented actors, yet it all comes to a screeching halt (and fiery flames) in 1900.
3. Enter the equally awesome text. The year is 1990 and a boy, Joseph, is running away from boarding school to the house of his estranged uncle, Albert Nightingale. The house is frozen in time, perhaps 1900? The house holds secrets, perhaps about Joseph’s family? Joseph is determined to get to the bottom of it; his uncle is determined to keep it under wraps. Struggles ensue until they both break down and many truths pour out. We learn, with a bittersweet sigh, that the Marvels are a creation of Uncle Albert, and Billy Marvel was an actor and Albert’s now deceased true love, an early victim of AIDS. We rejoice at Joseph and Albert’s connection and what is gained from that, and we mourn at what is lost, and then we mourn again when Albert succumbs to complications from AIDS as well.
4. How amazing were the sketches at the end? Just an exquisite few, where the story of the Marvels continues into a dreamy far-off future that feels just right.

Four things about The Nest that made it awesome:

1. The voice. After an eerie prologue, we quickly meet Steve, the protagonist. He’s twelve-ish and things are looking grim this summer. His mom just gave birth to a gravely sick baby who Steve refers to as “the baby” because it’s tough to get connected to an infant who has a weak heart and might die and will never turn out normal. Whatever normal is. More on that later. Steve also struggles with anxiety. While it’s not surprising that his anxiety is flaring up right now, what’s special is the way Oppel handles it—not over the top and his quirks don’t define him.
2. Phew, tension. We’ve got the sick baby, and the clock is ticking until a surgery to repair his heart. Steve can sense his mom’s sadness and his dad’s stress and there’s someone calling their home phone and not saying anything. The family jokingly calls him Mr. Nobody but it’s not really a joke, especially since Steve’s little sister swears she’s receiving calls from Mr. Nobody on her toy phone. And then we meet the knife-sharpening guy, four fingers on each hand, who cruises around Steve’s suburban block with nary a customer in sight. The knife guy – who is NOT going on my camping trip – seems particularly interested in Steve’s family. Oh, and there are the wasps circling their house. When Steve is stung early on and discovers he’s allergic, the loaded gun is introduced.
3. The titular nest. It’s the nest of the queen wasp, who is as creepy as the knife guy. No, at first she seems kind. She comes to Steve in his dream and offers to help with the baby. Over the course of many nights and many wasp/Steve conversations, it becomes apparent that the queen’s plan is sinister. She is building a perfect new baby in her nest, which is hanging outside the flawed baby brother’s window. When the wasp-made infant is done gestating, she’s going to need Steve’s help switching babies. It’s a giant leap of a premise, but it works here, and we NEED Steve to thwart her plan. It also gets us thinking about what is perfect and normal and how maybe perfect and normal are not what we want because, let’s face it, none of us are.
4. The way it all wraps up in the end, and yet it doesn’t. Yes, the wasps storm the house and the loaded gun goes off. And yet. And yet. And yet I had so many questions. As soon as I was done, I cornered my son and made him discuss The Nest with me. That’s what makes it exciting. The book is over but the conversations have just begun.

Both novels are about boys on internal and external quests. Both novels utilize language beautifully and appeal to readers on many levels. Both novels are page-turners. Admittedly, The Nest often had me peeking a few pages ahead to see if anyone was going to get stung or abducted or killed. Since I’ve already touted the awesomeness of Selznick’s illustrations, I’ll say that in The Nest, Jon Klassen’s eerie images aptly mirror the moody ambience of Oppel’s prose.

And then there’s this. Toward the end of The Marvels, when Joseph realizes that his uncle has invented the multi-generation theater family that he so believed in, he shouts angrily at him, “Stories aren’t the same as facts!”

To which Albert pauses and then says, “No, but they can both be true.”

As someone who has spent her life with one foot in the real world and one foot submerged in fiction, I found this dialogue pure magic. These lines, to me, embody why we tell stories and listen to stories and where we go in our heads when we do these things. While The Nest had me on the edge of my chair, The Marvels transported me to different chairs in different rooms in different eras. And so…the winner of this round is The Marvels.

—  Carolyn Mackler

What a great reason for The Marvels to win, and what a beautiful portrayal of the stories Selznick gives us. Now, I read The Marvels last June, so it’s a shame I don’t remember the specifics, but now that Mackler mentions it, that ending was stunning, transitioning back to images and a sort of dream state. I do think The Marvels is the more versatile book, offering a wealth of aesthetic pleasure, pathos, and love. The Nest brings another anxious fantasy world to life: something that could just be a dream is very real and scary. “Creepy and awesome” indeed (shoutout to Mackler’s 11 year old son). That word, though, awesome, applies to both books easily. We need to have a kind of shock and awe at our capacity to tell ourselves stories, something we see in Uncle Albert’s loneliness, Steven’s need to reassure himself, and in ourselves, everyday.

– Kid Commentator RGN

THE MARVELS WILL MOVE ON TO ROUND 3

Here’s what I remember about high school, both as a student and, years later, as a teacher: In many ways it’s a theater of the absurd.

For all the ways we try to brand the high school experience as a piece of treasured Americana, much what goes on is pretty sinister when we pull back for a bird’s eye view. Take the safety drills in schools as politicians dissect and debate gun laws. Or the principals trying to exert empty power through late passes and detentions. How about testing becoming the curriculum, the inexplicable popularity of the meanest and most mundane of classmates, and, of course, the parents who both hover and abdicate their role.

The list is endless, and for kids with sharp eyes, it’s enraging.

Enter a wholly original novel that captures that theater of the absurd exactly.

I Crawl Through It is about four teens trying to attend (or escape) a high school where daily bomb drills are the norm – and possibly the work of one of our narrators.

Gustav, physics whiz, is building a helicopter that is invisible to most, but that somehow transports people anyway. Stanzi, in love with him, is attached to her lab coat and her scalpel, but not to the parents who have abandoned her to her isolating grief. China has turned in upon herself to become a walking anus on some days (other days a colon, an esophagus…anything that digests things) as she recovers from a Facebook-publicized rape at the hands of a classmate. And Landsdale, our pathological liar with a peculiar hair problem (it grows with each fib), hits on the truth more often than not.

This is an upside world where the creepy guy in the bushes can be a hero, where the responsible adults are AWOL, and where nothing makes sense for long. But mostly it’s a place that will be eerily familiar to every teen in America who is frantically trying to learn something meaningful as they grow up. What’s the answer? Who knows, people? In As I Crawl Through It, we’re still looking for the damn questions.

This won’t be a novel for everyone, but it was a terrific read for me. So many things worked here. From a writer’s perspective, I have to bow down to A.S. King’s finely drawn characters, her usual strong suit. I was especially fond of Stanzi and China, who emerge as amazingly strong girls despite all the ways that life tried to break them.

But what I loved most about I Crawl Through It was its refreshing originality as it used magical realism to explore the absurd world that teens are up against. The inner teacher in me kept thinking What a great book to use in a larger study of surrealism in art or to pair with Waiting for Godot and other absurdist theater. And more important, I started wondering about what kind of meaty conversations could get started in a classroom with a book like this. Here’s one conversation I’d want to hear: What is the most important thing you think we learn in high school? What is the real test question we’d ask if we could? What are the answer choices you’d provide? Thinking about that discussion makes me nervous… nervous and hopeful – the two emotions, as it happens, that filled me as I read this beautiful novel.

So how does it compare to Gone Crazy in Alabama, the last installment in the middle grade trilogy by Rita Williams Garcia?

Gone Crazy In Alabama follows the Gaither sisters of Brooklyn, New York– Delphine (13), Vonetta (11), and Fern (7) as they spend the summer of 1969 in Alabama with their notoriously persnickety grandmother, Big Ma. In early books, the sisters met the mother who left them – Cecile – and sampled life in California’s Black Panther movement. In Book Two, they tangled with a new love in their Dad’s life – and with the impact of the Viet Nam War and drug addiction on their uncle Darnell.

But in this book, Rita Williams-Garcia finally has to tie together all she has explored about the messy nature of sisters, the impact of social change on how we relate to each other, and the enduring bonds of family.

The squabbling trio is hilarious. Fern, the budding poet who refuses to eat chickens once she connects that food chain dots. Vonetta, dramatic and a little mean, stoking a story war between her elders. And finally, Delphine, stuck in the lonely place of being both an older sister and ally.

There’s so much to love in Gone Crazy in Alabama, not the least of which is its ability to toy mercilessly with a reader’s emotions. It gave me belly laughs (Lord! Throw me a mercy!) But just as often it made me teary, as when Delphine is left without an embrace from her mother. Like A.S. King, Rita Williams-Garcia is a master of creating nuanced and memorable characters. Not a single one – and the cast is large! – merged with another. Moreover, I wanted each and every one in my own family.

But the wow factor for me was the historical elements. We’ve all read novels where the history and research feels glued on. None of that happened here. Old feuds and family stories shared by Big Ma, Ma Charles (their great-grandmother) and Miss Totter (their great half-aunt) provide a natural way for readers to learn about the Trail of Tears and the intersection of the history of African Americans and First Nations. The girls came face to face with the difficult truths about the enslaved and their owners, including the children that resulted. Finally, the dynamics between the older generation of women and Pa’s new wife (known simply as Mrs.) shine a light on feminism as it emerged at different paces in Brooklyn and in the south.

What could have been a clunky history lesson became something artful and sensitive in the masterful hands of Rita Williams Garcia. The narrative was always about Delphine’s struggle to understand herself as a girl, as a sister, and as a daughter. It was about her journey to accept her family and the many ways of being loved by them. But the story was also an exploration of the history of a people that has been largely untold in schools. The difficult truths were written in a way that could be digested by young readers. Rita Williams-Garcia trusted them with the truth of what has come before.

The VERDICT: The comparison between these two titles seems unfair, given the different conventions of middle grade fiction and Young Adult. For me, I Crawl Through It had a more daring and complicated narrative style; it’s tough work to make different narrators strong enough to carry each part of their story. It was also, of the two, the more original. But Gone Crazy in Alabama was somehow more engaging. In the end, I decided to look at this through the eyes of young readers. Which of these casts could capture the hearts of the most readers? Which of these books offered readers new information about themselves and others? On a personal level, which book made me saddest when it came to an end?

For this round, I choose Gone Crazy in Alabama.

— Meg Medina

Extra points for a judge who uses the word “persnickety” in her writeup. It makes me not really care about the decision, but bravo to Medina’s choice as well, and to her great insights about Gone Crazy’s historical side. But why was Garcia-Williams’ middle-grade masterpiece more engaging than I Crawl Through It for me as well as Medina? In both books, the characters were very well drawn, but Fern, Vonetta, Delphine & Co. were more immediately lovable than the lonely teenagers of the absurd. While, as a sometimes-lonely teen, I did relate to Gustav, Stanzi, China, and Lansdale, and the surrealism worked for me, it might be too weird and emotionally raw for some people. But, by all means, pair it with Godot – that would be fascinating! You could also teach Garcia-Williams’ trilogy for middle schoolers along with a history unit about the ‘60’s, if you can get them to read that much. And the details in Gone Crazy are the bacon in the collard greens (yes, bad joke, and sorry, Fern): Butter and Sophie, the peculiarities of ironing sheets, cereal with cornflakes.

– Kid Commentator RGN

Thank god Gone Crazy won! I don’t like to say that I hate books, but there was little I liked about I Crawled Through It. As someone going through the terror of teenage years, I felt that, at most points, I could really relate to the feelings the characters have. I understand that feeling of trying to cope with whatever it is that needs coping in whatever way you can. And King really captures the angst of high school. But I honestly didn’t love it. It felt like a collection of feelings, of little snippets of a teenage experience, rather than a story with a plot. But maybe that’s just me. And besides, what was with that helicopter? On the other hand, I thoroughly enjoyed Gone Crazy in Alabama. While the plot wasn’t particularly enthralling, the bickering of the three sisters really was so realistic, so perfectly indicative of the experience of having to live with siblings, that I couldn’t help but fall in love with all of them. The one bone I have to pick with it is the fact that it’s a book in a series. And not just A book, the FINAL book. I read this book before I knew it was part of a series, and I absolutely hate reading books out of order, because this was clearly a continuation of whatever came before it. (I still haven’t read the others, but still). Otherwise, kudos to Rita Williams-Garcia! It’s definitely up at my top 3 for this battle.

– Kid Commentator NS

GONE CRAZY IN ALABAMA WILL MOVE ON TO ROUND 3

My favorite stories are ones that drive me out to the borderlands – a lawless patch of literary scrub – and boot me out of the car with no GPS, no tattered road atlas, not even a cheap plastic compass.

Challenger Deep by Neal Schusterman and Echo by Pam Munoz Ryan are two such books. They play with form, time, and space. Both ask questions; neither offers easy answers. They’re a little disorienting, a little dizzying, and hugely compelling.

In Challenger Deep, fifteen-year-old Caden Bosch, the main character, is stranded in his own borderlands – a desolate piece of real estate located somewhere between sanity and schizophrenia.

Caden’s a brilliant kid, one who’s slowly losing his mind. He doesn’t know where his descent into madness will end, or even when it started, because in his head, Time is different….It doesn’t move forward; it sort of moves sideways, like a crab.

Sometimes Caden is present in the real world, sometimes he’s aboard an imaginary ship helmed by the sinister Captain, and headed for the deepest point on earth: Challenger Deep. As Caden’s condition worsens, his despairing parents commit him to a mental hospital. Schusterman’s son is a victim of mental illness and his drawings, which are sad and arresting, illustrate the book.

The story is told from Caden’s point of view, in scenes that veer between day-to-day realities and the dark unreality of time spent with the Captain. Scenes where the Captain is present, or invoked, are plentiful. In the beginning, I found them evocative, unsettling, even terrifying.

….waiting in that moment is the Captain. He’s patient. And he waits. Always.

                  Even before there was a ship, there was the Captain.

This journey began with him, you suspect it will end with him, and everything between is the powdery meal of windmills that might be giants grinding bones to make their bread.

                  Tread lightly, or you’ll wake them.

As Challenger Deep progressed, though, I felt that the Captain’s storyline slowed the novel’s pace and diminished its hold over me. I found myself hurrying through those chapters, impatient to leave the manifestation of Caden’s illness, so I could find out how he was faring in his battle against it.

It was Schusterman’s wrenching depictions of Caden’s real world pain—the pain of his mind betraying him, of being left at a mental hospital, of forging fragile bonds with other patients, only to see them broken—that tore my heart out.

Mental illness is many things. It’s sadness, fear, grief, anger, hopelessness….but most of all it’s loss, and Schusterman doesn’t flinch from showing us all that Caden’s disease takes from him: his family and friends, his past and present, maybe even his future.

I think of all the things I want to do and want to be, Caden tells us. Ground-breaking artist. Business entrepreneur. Celebrated game designer. “Ah, he had such potential,” the ghosts of the future lament in mournful voices, shaking their heads…..Sometimes I think it would be easier to die than to face that, because “what could have been” is much more highly regarded than “what should have been.” Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.

In Echo, the Brothers Grimm meet Annie Proulx as Munoz Ryan draws her readers into a different sort of borderlands – the gloamy realm between classic fairytales and historical fiction.

As the book opens, fifty years before World War II, young Otto is playing hide and seek and gets lost in the woods. There he meets three strange sisters: Eins, Zwei, and Drei, who are bound by a cruel spell. They ask him to help them break the spell, imbue his harmonica with magic, and tell him a prophecy:

YOUR FATE IS NOT YET SEALED.

EVEN IN THE DARKEST NIGHT, A STAR WILL SHINE,

A BELL WILL CHIME, A PATH WILL BE REVEALED.

Otto isn’t sure he knows how to help the sisters, but they tell him not worry. They’re connected now, by a silken thread of destiny. The next day, Otto finds his way home. Time passes, but he never forgets the sisters, or the promise he made to help them.

So far, this feels like familiar fairytale ground, but one page later, Echo thrusts us into real-world Germany in 1933. There, Friedrich Schmidt, a sensitive boy, dreams of becoming a conductor. He plays a harmonica—one with a strange mark on it that looks a bit like a Star of David. Worried about what might happen if Nazis see it, Friedrich tucks the instrument into a box of harmonicas bound for the US. When Friedrich’s father is arrested by the Nazis, Friedrich risks everything to free him. His story ends on a cliff-hanger, with the one, two, three of a waltz echoing in his head, and Hitler’s thugs closing in.

The harmonica’s music echoes down through the years, as the instrument makes its way into the hands of Mike Flannery, a boy in an orphanage near Philadelphia, and then Ivy Lopez, a girl living in California. Like Friedrich, Mike and Ivy are talented musicians, and like him, they face difficulties in their lives.

Echo, with its simple, straightforward—and in places, breathtaking—writing, is sweetly old-fashioned in tone, yet timeless in its assertion of the essential goodness of people, and the ability of music to carry us through hard times, to be the stars in the dark night that show us the path home.

Munoz Ryan has created three engaging characters each of whom is grounded in his or her time and place, yet speaks eloquently to modern readers struggling to make sense out of a world that’s often confusing and cruel. Friedrich, Mike, and Ivy try hard to do the right thing, even when it’s not the easy thing, and they won my heart because of that, but I sometimes felt that they were too good and too selfless, and would have liked to see the more subtle shades of their personalities. In addition, the dialogue between characters struck me as stilted in places, lacking the contractions, slang, and energy that color everyday conversation.

Challenger Deep and Echo are both ambitious, original books. Though Challenger Deep seems written more for teens, and Echo for middle-graders, both take risks with structure, demand that readers work to unlock mysteries and metaphors, and offer endings that are hopeful, but not entirely tidy or happy.

Caden comes to the hard realization that the Captain will wait be waiting for him on the deep, dark seas of his mind for the rest of his life. And on an evening embroidered with the thread of destiny, in a theater crowned with a halo of light, in New York City in 1951, Friedrich, Mike, and Ivy find that despite the heartbreaks life has handed them, music can still work a magic all of its own.

It was super hard to choose between these two books, but for me, Echo was more successful in meeting the challenges it set for itself and so it’s the winner of this round.

But to be truthful, I feel like I’m the winner here because I got to read two amazing books, by two immensely talented authors.

— Jennifer Donnelly

Donnelly’s way of framing this match–in “the borderlands”–is very interesting. As she illustrates, Challenger Deep clearly lies on the borderlands of a mind between imagination and reality. In a way, Echo does as well, the musical dreams and aspirations of Friedrich, Michael, and Ivy contrasting with the harsh worlds they live in. For Caden, imagination become his bane as he tries to ground himself in the real world; for Echo’s protagonists, music becomes their escape. Personally, I’d prefer if Challenger Deep moved on, again because it addresses a very challenging subject in a complex manner. Like Donnelly, I definitely moved through the later part of the book faster, but for me, that only testified further to the raw power of Shusterman’s language and the Captain’s haunting presence. But Echo also threads the line between imagination and reality in a seemingly more simple way, with straightforward language and a refreshing voice of innocence. And like Donnelly, with such a high level of work here, I can only be thankful.

– Kid Commentator RGN

I absolutely love twisty-turny books with complicated plot twists and cliffhangers, but Echo had one cliffhanger that bothered me a bit too much. I find that in books following multiple people and multiple stories, the kinds that change from part to part like Echo does, I always become attached to one character or one story over the other(s). In this case, it was Friedrich. I was so drawn in by his story, and not having read the blurb, I was under the impression that it would be all about him. I was quite obviously wrong. His story ended abruptly, and I was pushed–unwillingly, I might add–into Pennsylvania with Mike. While Mike and Ivy’s stories were intriguing, I couldn’t help but feel like I was skimming too fast just so I could get to the point where I found out what happened with Friedrich. If I’m being completely honest, I would have rather read a book only about Friedrich, minus all of the harmonica-through-the-ages stuff. Challenger Deep was so touching, and I’ve already mentioned that I uglily sobbed at the end, and so I personally think that it should have won the match instead especially considering the not-so-often portrayed side of schizophrenia.

– Kid Commentator NS

ECHO WILL MOVE ON TO ROUND 3