My dad introduced us to Star Wars early on in our house. We watched the original films over and over as kids, and when we got older, religiously went to see the subsequent movies (We still do!).

I  went to a midnight showing of one movie. Since it was actually at midnight, I have no idea which movie it was, because I dozed through parts of it. (I checked with my brother, who was with me that night and is a better historian when it comes to Star Wars movie watching. The episode I dozed through was Revenge of the Sith. I was a young single mom of a two-year-old who was still getting me up at night when that movie came out. I did watch it again later with my eyes open).

I’ve passed down my interest in Star Wars to the kids, although the franchise and its size have started to alienate me a little. It’s not the same, special thing it was when I was a kid, with a limited number of movies to enjoy. Someday there will be so many subplots and new characters that I won’t have any idea who half of them are (that may already have happened, as indicated above).

Two knows I’m a nerd, and she handed me Don’t Cosplay with My Heart, by Cecil Castellucci, after she’d read and enjoyed it. She’d read the “good parts” to Three along the way and thought I would like it, too.

For all the ways Two and I are very, very different, she knows which books I will like, and her recommendation didn’t disappoint.

This slow-burn teen romance has themes including gender roles and equality, friendship, and identity. The story takes the reader on an exploration of what it means to be a female, what it means to be a nerd, and how we deal with crises in our lives.

I enjoyed everything about it. I’ve always been curious about cosplay and have wanted an opportunity to try it – the Chaplain and I aren’t the sort of people who throw costume parties, or know people who do. (Since I’ve been going to my dance class, I’ve been to more fundraisers and events in the past year than in the past ten years combined, and there have been plenty of chances to dress up, which has been how I’ve gotten to express that part of me. Maybe someday I will be the one throwing the costume parties. I also plan to have LOTS of fun when I get to be Mother of the Bride/Groom…. hopefully nearly as many times as I have children.) 

One concept in the book that particularly got my attention was bounding. From my understanding, bounding is almost exclusively discussed in connection with Disney. I’m not a Disney fan, but I LOVE the idea of bounding, and when I first read about it in the book, I thought it was a completely new idea. Then, I remembered the night of the midnight Star Wars movie showing.

I TOTALLY bounded that night without even knowing what it was called. I wore a fur vest with a crossbody bag in a nod to Wookies, and I think that cements my nerd status even if I couldn’t remember the name of the movie without help. That is, after all, one of the ideas central to the book – if there is something you geek out about, you are a nerd, and you don’t have to prove it to anyone, not with your trivia knowledge or enthusiasm or anything else.

This book had such a great way of getting the reader to think about how we own our identity and find our tribe, and the lessons are valuable to a reader of any age. If you are young at heart or a nerd (and aren’t we all a nerd about something?), you’ll appreciate this title as a lovely break from Grown Up Books.