Henk's Reviews > Almond

Quite melodramatic and with a lot of coincidences. However what especially did not sit well with me is how the neurodiverse main character is supposedly “cured” by friendship, romantic love and a Disney like act of self sacrifice.
… I still truly believe the heart can prevail over the brain

The first three (short, all of them are) chapters of Almond are wild, dark and sucked me in immediately. The narrator, a teenager who recounts growing up through bullying and trauma while dealing with the diagnosis of having small amygdala (the titular almond), reminds me of Oscar from Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Emotions are strange to him and his mother and grandma train the boy to interpret other people, while imprinting the mantra: Don’t stand out, that’s all you need to do.
An other proverb that comes back is: Too much honesty hurts others.

Won-pyung Sohn as said starts the book of with a proverbial bang, but the plot in the novel is in general much too convenient, with not only a very weird request of a totally unknown to the main person professor, but also his son turning up in the class of the main character. In general I found that part 1 (that is rather documentary but very effectively captures the cruelty of children) didn't flow in a naturally way into the later parts of the book. This while the book in my view takes a lot of too often used tropes in the later three sections, that loosely fit in the Band-of-outcasts-with-more-similarities-than-imagined-á-la-Breakfast-Club theme.

The whole rebellious kid (You’re stupid because you know too much) having a heart of gold when he is finally “seen” in by an outsider is for instance something that I have see much too often. He does have good quotes, like: If I can’t protect myself from being hurt I rather hurt other people. but he is really a bad boy as well, as animal abuse needs to drive home to the reader.
And there is an aloof a girl who is apparently practicing running in a library?
Overall the trope of someone different being a saint to help the rest see the value of normal life, is something I find a bit standard, and then there is the way how the whole book turns into a story of someone “recovering” from a neurological condition due to romantic love.
Quite Disney, and in some kind of way relaying for me that these things can go away as long as someone just tries enough.
All this combined made this for me a 2.5 star read, rounded down.