HELLO everybody and welcome to my stop on the Holding Up the Universe Blog Tour! I am thrilled to be a part of this blog tour.

Holding Up the Universe by Jennifer Niven

Pub. Date: October 4, 2016

Publisher: Knopf BFYR/Random House

Pages: 400

Format: Hardcover, eBook

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Jack Masselin is a senior in high school. His life’s pretty good; he’s got friends, popularity, and a girlfriend (well, on and off). He’s got a secret, though, that he hasn’t told anyone-he has prosopagnosia, and can’t recognize faces. Instead he has to use other indicators like body language and voice to put the name to the face, and for the most part, it works. He did accidentally mix up his girlfriend with her cousin, but thankfully that’s not usually the case.

Libby Strout is going back to school for the first time in a while. After having to be extricated from her home, she’s lost lots of weight and has been preparing for her first day back. She has goals; make friends and join the Damsels. She loves dancing and has dreamed of being on the team.

Holding Up the Universe is a story about first-time meetings and finding true friendships, and encourages people to look past stereotypes and appearances to get to know someone.

I have heard a lot of praise for Jennifer Niven’s book All the Bright Places, so I knew I had to pick up this book. I first want to point out the beauty of the cover (and how stunning the finished copy looks), which really made me curious about the book. Also, the cover does really fit well with the story. This book was brutally realistic and really described the characters’ struggles and emotions. I felt like I was actually there, inside the characters’ heads. I loved that the author tackled two things you don’t see a lot of in YA literature and put them in a story together. Not only did it feature prosopagnosia, which I had never heard of before, but it was also loosely based on a true story. Jennifer Niven’s encouraging persona is really inspiring; she wants people to feel important and not worthless and I really look up to her for that. I will definitely be reading All the Bright Places soon!

ABOUT JENNIFER NIVEN:

By the time I was ten, I had already written numerous songs, a poem for Parker Stevenson (“If there were a Miss America for men, You would surely win”), two autobiographies (All About Me and My Life in Indiana: I Will Never Be Happy Again), a Christmas story, several picture books (which I illustrated myself) featuring the Doodle Bugs from Outer Space, a play about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s sister entitled Blindness Strikes Mary, a series of prison mysteries, a collection of short stories featuring me as the main character (an internationally famous rock star detective), and a partially finished novel about Vietnam. I was also an excellent speller from a very early age.
In 2000, I started writing full-time, and I haven’t stopped… I’ve written nine books (#9 will be out Oct 4, 2016), and when I’m not working on the tenth, I’m writing the screenplay for All the Bright Places, contributing to my web magazine, Germ (www.germmagazine.com), thinking up new books, and dabbling in TV. I am always writing. Website | Twitter

An ARC of this book was sent to me by the publisher for review, which affects my review in no way.