Meg & Linus
Hanna Nowinski
Published by: Swoon Reads
Publication date: April 18th 2017
Genres: Contemporary, LGBTQ+, Young Adult
Can friendship, Star Trek, drama club, and a whole lot of coffee get two nerdy best friends through the beginning of their senior year of high school?
Meg and Linus are best friends bound by a shared love of school, a coffee obsession, and being queer. It’s not always easy to be the nerdy lesbian or gay kid in a suburban town. But they have each other. And a few Star Trek boxed sets. They’re pretty happy.
But then Sophia, Meg’s longtime girlfriend, breaks up with Meg. Linus starts tutoring the totally dreamy new kid, Danny—and Meg thinks setting them up is the perfect project to distract herself from her own heartbreak. But Linus isn’t so sure Danny even likes guys, and maybe Sophia isn’t quite as out of the picture as Meg thought she was. . . .
From crowdsourced young adult imprint Swoon Reads comes Meg & Linus by Hanna Nowinski, a fun friendship story about two quirky teens who must learn to get out of their comfort zones and take risks—even if that means joining the drama club, making new friends, and learning how to stand on your own.
Your trapped in an episode of Star Trek, which one is it and why? what character are you? Would you do anything differently?
One of my favorite episodes is the first episode of Voyager. The ship is flung across the galaxy into the Delta Quadrant, facing a 75-year journey home. They find this array which they determine has caused the displacement wave, and it should also be able to get them home again. However, the Caretaker, the single life form on the array, can’t help them because he’s running out of time – he’s dying. His actions had caused irreparable damage to a planet a long time ago and he’s used the array to protect the inhabitants of that planet ever since. Before his death, he needs to make sure to supply them with everything they need in the future, and then he has to destroy the array so it can’t fall into the hands of the planet’s enemy and be used against them.
Just before his death, the self-destruct is damaged and Captain Janeway is now faced with an impossible choice: to use the array to send her ship home and let the planet’s enemies get a hold of the technology, or to destroy it and leave her crew stranded, facing a decades-long journey home.
Janeway decides to destroy the array, which is the only thing that could ever happen on Star Trek, of course. But also true to Star Trek, the episode focuses more on the crew members and their lives than on special effects and heroics. You get to know each and every one of them and you get to understand and feel what it is they’re giving up by making that choice. You learn about their families. Their children and partners back home, who they will most likely never see again. It’s deeply personal, and while choosing to protect an innocent species over finding a way home is undeniably the right choice, it’s also heartbreaking to watch.
However, I’d trap myself in this episode because you also get to see the building of a new community, the very start of a new family. There’s conflict among the crew, but there’s also the sense of belonging to something bigger, and of friendship and support.
I hope I wouldn’t do anything differently. Captain Janeway is always an inspiration to me, but in this episode, torn between her obligation to her crew and her obligation as a person to cause no harm to anyone, she is amazing. This episode, in my opinion, emphasizes the point that you can’t find your own happiness at the expense of another’s. Which is one of the central messages of Star Trek in general. But I really hope that if I were in her shoes, I’d be as strong as Captain Janeway.
Author Bio:
Hanna Nowinski is a language enthusiast and trained translator for German and English who lives in the middle of nowhere, Germany. She has wanted to be a writer since she learned that books were made by real people. As a kid, she made up her own bedtime stories, mostly sending her stuffed animals on adventures around the world. She loves books, music, coffee, and getting way too emotionally invested in TV shows. Meg & Linus is her debut novel.
Thanks for hosting today! :)
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