Michelle Blanchard Ardillo

I’ll begin this review of The Optimists by Brian Platzer with a quote from another reviewer on Goodreads:

I’ll admit, when I finished this book I immediately went to Goodreads to look at some of the reviews, a few 5-star, a few 1-star, and then I turned to the 3-star reviews. Near the top I read the one above, and it totally captured how I felt about most of this book.

This is the third book I’ve read recently with children who have been neglected or living in poverty or living with no parental support, and I just have to say it, I’M DONE WITH THAT. I might have to reread a Sophie Kinsella or a Janet Evanovich to clean my palate, so to speak.

What I loved about this book: the main character, Mr. Keating, is a middle school English teacher, something I spent nearly 20 years doing, and still, to some extent, continue to do through substitute teaching and after-school tutoring. I LOVE teaching grammar, parts of speech, essay structure, vocabulary. I’ve had students like Mr. Keating’s Clara, students who blew the top off of every assignment (one of them actually named Clara, believe it or not), students who never got a single thing wrong on any test or quiz or classroom assignment in two whole years (I taught 7th and 8th grade each year, so I had most students for two years straight).

Unlike Mr. Keating, I see my former students quite often, or at least I see them on LinkedIn or social media, either because they have reached out to me or because I am in contact with their parents. I have former students who are doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, writers, teachers, nurses, you name it, I’ve watched them grow into who they were meant to be. It is one of the most gratifying parts about teaching.

I also loved Mr. Keating’s relationship with his wife Caroline. The beginning of their courtship, the middle where work had to be done to restore things, and then the end where supreme sacrifices were made, which I won’t detail due to spoilers. I loved that Mr. Keating truly loved Caroline, her many fine qualities along with her ability to be aloof and removed at times.

I loved that Caroline was a bookstore manager and she and Mr. Keating spent a lot of time reading books on their beige couch in their NYC apartment.

I loved the parts of the novel that took place at school, in the faculty lounge, in the classroom, all of that seemed so realistic to me.

What I didn’t love about this book: As Goodreads Angela writes above, I also didn’t love the knock-knock jokes, but I really didn’t love the explanation of each joke that followed. If you have to explain a joke, then…

I didn’t love the baseball talk, Yankees or otherwise.

I didn’t love the large chunk about Clara’s crusade against animal cruelty; it was just too graphic for me and seemed out of sync with the tone of the rest of the book.

I didn’t love how much the narration jumped around, often within a segment that was meant to be past, or meant to be present, at times this was a bit tricky to follow.

I didn’t love how so many things were thrown in, almost like Platzer was trying to prove he really knew each time period he was writing about: Bernie Maddof, the economic crash, the beginning of wearable devices and early tech from Silicon Valley, ranting about the sitcom Friends, the ups and downs of owning a restaurant in NYC (Bobby Flay was on CNBC bemoaning the very same thing just yesterday), and on and on.

I didn’t love Platzer breaking the fourth wall between narrator and reader and inserting the writer whose book we are reading. (I realize that sounds confusing, because it is, and it is why I didn’t love that part of this book.)

This book is in parts inspiring and in parts depressing. It seems like it would have been difficult to write within the structure that Platzer set for himself. I didn’t love it and I didn’t hate it. I think Goodreads Angela said it best. Maybe I should have just reposted her review and moved on.

Thank you to NetGalley and Little, Brown for the ARC ebook. As a fellow English teacher, I wish Mr. Platzer all the best in his teaching career and in his writing career.