Holding Up the Universe Posted on December 15, 2021March 13, 2025 By Brooke Bertram I remember the first time I ever read Holding Up the Universe by Jennifer Niven. I had grown to admire Niven after she released All the Bright Places, and so when I found out that she was releasing a new novel, I was ecstatic. I wasn’t quite sure what I was expecting at the time, but I knew that whatever she wrote I would love – and I did. Holding Up the Universe is about a girl named Libby and a boy named Jack. Libby, at just the age of ten years old, loses her mother unexpectedly. Because of this, she becomes depressed and ends up using food as a way to cope with her loss. After a while of this coping mechanism, Libby becomes home-bound and ends up having to be home-schooled. This then turns into Libby having to be cut out of her home. This moment is videotaped and posted to the internet where she earns the title, “America’s Fattest Teen.” Jack Masselin has something different going on. In the novel, we find out that he has prosopagnosia – the inability to recognize people’s faces. We find out that he has never actually been diagnosed so no one actually knows that he has it. I don’t want to spoil the story, but Jack and Libby do end up crossing paths, and the both of them see each other for who they really are. I think this novel can really fit into the mission of The Broken Plate. This book focuses on two characters who feel as though there is no one that will ever understand them because of these things they are dealing with. They at times can feel unwanted or unheard. What Holding Up the Universe and The Broken Plate have in common is this – they both strive to realize how important it is to hear these voices and to let them know that we want them to be heard. The Broken Plate Recommends
The Broken Plate Recommends Nothing But Blackened Teeth and Inner Demons Posted on December 15, 2021March 13, 2025 At The Broken Plate, the strife that accompanies being human is something we value greatly. Often, themes of fragility and the presence of various inner demons appear in ghost stories. There is strife from things like Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House to shows like The Haunting of Bly… Read More
The Broken Plate Recommends The Mists of Avalon and Untold Stories Posted on November 3, 2021March 13, 2025 The Broken Plate is a literary magazine that seeks to provide a platform for individual stories. Each individual has a story, and we live in a society that privileges certain stories over others. This is true, especially in the literary world. However, The Broken Plate seeks to combat this by… Read More
The Broken Plate Recommends The Trope-ification of Books is Literary Brain Rot Posted on November 26, 2024March 13, 2025 Book tropes describe a variety of recurring plot devices, character archetypes, and themes that are written consistently enough to become recognizable by readers and warrant their own names. While they are not necessarily a new phenomenon, their influence has certainly grown with the rise of social media. They’ve become a… Read More