When the students in Mrs. Quenell’s Special Topics in
English receive their journals, they have mixed emotions. However, when they start
to write, they discover the journals take them to the moment in time in their
lives just before tragedy struck. For the narrator, Jam, this moment is on a
field with her boyfriend Reeve just before his death. Jam and the other students decide to name the world
of their transported experiences. Pronounced like the zhuh in Jacques, Belzhar
is a French take on Bell Jar to honor the writer they are studying, Sylvia
Plath. At first, trips to Belzhar become
an obsession for the students. But as the semester progresses, they find solace not in traveling
to the past, but in each other.
Meg Wolitzer, best known for her adult fiction, has written a
fast-paced novel for teens. The reader,
like the students, is easily transported through the writing. Even if the cynical
reader rolls her eyes at Jam’s young love, she is guiltily rewarded when she
finds out the narrator has not been recounting events exactly as they occurred.
That, along with a happy resolution for one of the other tragic stories, helps
the book end on a sweet, rather than bittersweet, note.
