Book Four

My next book is Sarah's Key  by Tatiana de Rosnay. This book was recommended to me by a good friend of mine. I've heard nothing but good things about it, plus, it's historical fiction which is a guilty pleasure of mine, especially when it's WWII. I'm excited to start reading this one.

Here's a short synopsis of the book, followed by praise for the book:

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten-year-old girl, is taken with her parents by the French police as they go door-to-door arresting Jewish families in the middle of the night. Desperate to protect her younger brother, Sarah locks him in a bedroom cupboard--their secret hiding place--and promises to come back for him as soon as they are released.

Sixty Years Later: Sarah's story intertwines with that of Julia Jaramond, an American journalist investigating the roundup. In her research, Julia stumbles onto a trail of secrets that link her to Sarah, and to questions about her own romantic future.

"A remarkable novel. Like Sophie's Choice, it's a book that impresses itself upon one's heart and soul forever." --Naomi Ragen, author of The Saturday Wife


"It will make you cry--and remember." --Jenna Blum, New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Save Us


"Rich in mystery, intrigue, and suspense, Sarah's Key made me wonder and weep." --The Roanoke Times


"Sarah's Key unlocks a star-crossed, heart-thumping story . . . This book will stay in your mind long after it's back on the shelf." --Risa Miller, author of Welcome to Heavenly Heights


If you're interested in reading Sarah's Key, you can find it on Amazon.com:

Happy: Final Review

Happy by Alex Lemon is not even close to being one of the "happiest" books I've ever read, but it is one of the best. I would have expected nothing less from one of my favorite poets. As with his poetry, Happy is full of stellar imagery and descriptions and raw emotions.

"The neighborhood is fragmented, milky orange and diamondy, and the nothingness inside me seems impossibly heavy," (201). 

I have to go back to what Nick Flynn said about this book because it stood out to me from the very beginning, and now that I've finished it, I understand it completely: "The pyrotechnic prose of Alex Lemon's memoir creates an electrifying portrait of a body in crisis, and the way the soul is inexorably, reluctantly, dragged along . . . If ever a book was written in blood, it is this one."

Alex suffers and endures more physical pain than anyone should, especially as a student in college. Most college students are partying, trying to fit in, trying to figure out who they are and what they want to do with the rest of their lives, and to experience what Alex did would be unbearable on top of all that. As a recent college graduate, this book really struck a chord with me, especially since I've had more than my fair share of trips to the emergency room and it's hard going through things like that pretty much alone. Your family is far away and you don't have many reliable friends. It's amazing what the body and soul can endure and Happy shows, more than once, a young man at his breaking point both emotionally and physically.

He bares all to his readers, holding nothing back. He's dealt with fits of rage and depression after his brain surgery, taking his anger out on his mom, his friends, and most frequently, himself. He spends most of his time alone as he begins his long and slow recovery and the things he can no longer do such as reading and walking haunt him daily:

"Not being able to read is making me crazy. Words crawl across the page like they're alive, like bugs. They jump. They tick," (182). 

"I want to move, to lose myself in a book," (182).  

The end of the book is bittersweet and full of more of the imagery that hooked me on Lemon's writing in the first place.

"The tightness, the just-bearable despair in my chest thaws, melts, breaks apart. Light courses through my veins. I can feel the world pinballing around me," (209).

"It feels like there's a beehive in my chest and it is on fire and it is beautiful and it is there always and forever and I start to weep I'm so happy," (212).

There is perseverance and acceptance. Alex never gives up, regardless of how many times he wanted to. And he accepts that some things can not be changed. In the end, he learns how to live up to his nickname once again: Happy.

Overall, this book gets Starbucks Peppermint Mocha (4 out of 5). I love almost everything about this book. My one problem was that one section of the book was a complete run-on sentence. Although I liked the style, I had to reread it a few times to make sure I was getting it. The rest of the book had very few run-ons, so an entire section of just one long run-on just didn't really seem to fit for me. Aside from that, this book was wonderful and it's definitely worth reading. You can buy it on Amazon.com:
Thanks for reading!

 

 

Happy: Halfway

I’m about half-way through Happy by Alex Lemon and I have loved it so far. It was difficult for me to put it down long enough to write this. First, let me say, if you are offended by strong language, this might not be the book for you. Also if you have a weak stomach when it comes to a lot of blood and other graphic images, you may not want to read this. If things like that don’t bother you, then I’d definitely recommend this one.

Lemon’s imagery and descriptions throughout the book are great. Even just in the first few lines of the book, you can see and feel what he’s going through:

“The world whirls when I crack open. Bookshelf, poster board, the windows wink their eyes. The digital clock is a red blur. Every light pulses yelloworange and brilliant, and the TV is a blue splash. When I stand, the dorm room spins and I tip, slamming my chin into the bed frame. My temple rocks off of the cinder-block wall and I crash back to the mattress. The first pounding breath is Good morning you asshole and my insides rubberband,” (13).

The first and last lines are my favorite. He cracks open rather than wakes up and his insides rubberband and you just know exactly the way those things feel. Even if you’ve never experienced those feelings, you can imagine them, and they give you a wonderful image. And he never neglects the colors in the world around him. His descriptions of the colors and how they blur together really emphasizes how physically sick he is. He can’t see properly, he’s constantly dizzy.

For most of the first half of the book, he brushes off these symptoms, telling people he just has a cold or the flu. He’s unable to field any balls as catcher for his baseball team which makes his coach and teammates irate. Finally his girlfriend convinces him to go to the campus health clinic to see if they can do anything for him. He first sees a nurse, who is fairly certain it is merely an inner-ear infection and gives him a prescription and sends him on his way. Of course, the medicine doesn’t help.

At this point, I’m frustrated for him. If I had a dollar for every time I went to a doctor and was misdiagnosed or they just couldn’t figure out what was causing me pain I’d be richer than Bill Gates. Okay, I wouldn’t be that rich. But I could probably afford to pay off all my student loans. On top of that, I’m feeling even more frustrated because before my mom was diagnosed with MS, they thought she had an inner-ear infection as well. I feel like if a doctor ever tells you that you have an inner-ear infection, you should probably get a second opinion and have more tests done because it’s probably something more severe than that.

He sees another doctor who recommends he goes to a neurologist. He has an MRI and they discover he has a brain malformation—a lesion on his brain near the brain stem that has probably been there all his life that had bled and stopped. With rest and a few extra precautions, he should be okay.

It seems the more the doctors tell him he’s improving, the less okay he really is. He deals with fits of rage, memory loss, and the continued blurred vision and dizziness. On top of that, he’s a college student, just trying to be normal and go to parties. So he drinks, he gets high, and it’s not really clear if doing those things helps to calm him down, makes no difference, or makes things worse.

His eccentric mother worries about him incessantly and is trying desperately to adjust to the changes in her son as he lashes out at her occasionally for no reason. At times she seems like a sweet woman who just wants what’s best for her family and other times she just seems downright crazy. He describes how she used to come to his high school baseball games and bring the wooden dining room chairs to sit in with a plate of “real food”.  Teenagers are generally embarrassed by their parents anyway, but then to have a parent act the way she did would probably be worse. Lemon’s teammates teased him about it often. Although he hasn’t said he is embarrassed by his mother, some of his actions say it for him.

So far, I love this book. It’s fantastic and the irony of the title (which is also his nickname) makes it that much better. Over and over he is called “Happy” even though there have been very few moments in the book where he seems truly happy (whether under the influence of drugs or otherwise). At this point in the book, things seem like they’re really turning around and he’s improving, but in my gut, I just know things will get worse. Although that’s partially because I’ve done a little research on Alex Lemon prior to reading this book. After all, that's what makes a good author and book: You know how it ends, and you still want to devour every page just to see how it gets there. Either way, I’m hooked and can’t wait to read the rest.

Book Three

My next book is Happy by Alex Lemon. I have read two of his books of poetry, Hallelujah Blackout, and Fancy Beasts and both were excellent. When I was reading Fancy Beasts this past semester for a project in my creative writing class, I was looking things up online and found that he had a memoir coming out soon. I read some excerpts from it online and I was hooked. So here we are and Happy is the third book on my list.

Here's some of the praise Happy received:

"Alex Lemon takes his reader inside the terror and strangeness of illness--and gives us, along the way, a loving portrait, of a devoted, wonderfully nutty mother. Lemon is a brave, headlong writer, and he captures the life of the body with vivid and memorable intensity." --Mark Doty, author of Dog Years and Fire to Fire


"The pyrotechnic prose of Alex Lemon's memoir creates an electrifying portrait of a body in crisis, and the way the soul is inexorably, reluctantly, dragged along . . . If ever a book was written in blood, it is this one."
--Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City


"Happy unfurls like gauze, revealing not a wound, but a series of intricate and beautiful scars. Alex reminds us that though we can't make it through this life unscathed, we can make it through transformed." --Robin Romm, author of The Mercy Papers and The Mother Garden


"A page-turner on par with the best thrillers . . . Lemon's exquisite prose blasts us out of our own time, heart, brain, and body into his, making an acute empathy possible. Read this and weep, laugh, weep." --Library Journal, Editor's Pick

This sounds like a fantastic book and memoir and I can't wait to get started. It shouldn't be too hard to beat Life of Pi--it will at least have quite a bit of excitement, that's for sure. You can also look this up on Amazon.com and read excerpts from it, so if you like what you see, you can buy it!

Life of Pi: Final Review

Well, it only took me a couple weeks (although it feels more like a month) to finally finish Life of Pi by Yann Martel. I'd say it's pretty obvious that I didn't like this book since it took me so long to read it. However, I do have a couple positive things to say about it.

First, it is beautifully written. Martel has long beautiful passages describing the scenery and the world around Pi. Everything from the animals on the boat to the ocean to the few supplies on the lifeboat are all described in wonderful detail. He has several lovely descriptions and one of my favorites was his description of a town they visited:

"The coolness was as pleasing as having a mint in your mouth," (50).

It's a fantastic image. You can feel and taste that mint and can imagine what it would be like to have that feeling envelop your body. That's what being on the beach is like for me. It's a cool, tingling sensation all over your skin.

The other thing I really enjoyed about the book was the discussion of religion. As I may have mentioned in my last post, Pi eventually considers himself to be a part of three different religions: Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam. His descriptions and thoughts on religion were quite interesting and thought-provoking. He discussed the religions separately, describing how they made him feel and grow as a person, and he spoke of them altogether, making them work in a harmony the rest of humanity could only dream of. When defending his choice to practice three religions, Pi says,

"Bapu Gandhi said, 'All religions are true.' I just want to love God," (69). 

And really, what does it matter what religion we choose to be. Isn't religion supposed to be about loving God in the first place? There are many other quotes throughout the book regarding religion, and all are worth taking a look at in my opinion, but my other favorite is this:

“There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, ‘Business as usual.’ But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening. These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out,” (70-71).

Beautiful passages and discussion of three very different religions. Those are the two best things about this book, in my opinion.

Now, on to the not-so-great things about this book. There are many, in my opinion, but I'll try to keep it brief. First, there was not a lot of action throughout the book. The most exciting/action-filled parts were when the ship sank and Pi ended up on a lifeboat with the tiger. Everything else was painfully slow, which is why it took me such a long time to finish the book.

I didn't know that there were lifeboats big enough to hold not only a tiger, but a human, as well as several other animals (a hyena, a zebra, and an orangutan), plus life jackets, food and water supplies, etc. Trying to imagine a lifeboat big enough to house all of these was quite a stretch for me.

After the ship sinks, the remainder of the book (more than the last half of it) just describes what it was like on the ocean, stuck in a small lifeboat with a tiger. Things got interesting a couple times, but most of it seemed redundant and repetitive. Nothing is told in any sort of order. In chapter 66, he talks about killing sea turtles for food. He then rambles on for several chapters about the sea life surrounding the lifeboat (and on the underside of the lifeboat), his sleep patterns, and the numerous times he thought he saw a ship or boat. Then, in chapter 70, he goes right back to talking about  how difficult it was to kill a sea turtle. Normally it doesn't bother me when a book isn't written in chronological order, but this really irked me, which made it all the more difficult to read.

Another major complaint was the end of the book. I'll try to discuss this without giving away too much (in case any of you still want to read it after reading this review). Basically, the very end of the book is the report of a Japanese official about the sinking of the ship Pi and his family were on. The report is very straightforward and the complete opposite of the beautiful descriptions and imagery that filled the rest of the book. Although sometimes getting myself through all the detail was difficult, it was far better than reading something so boring as a report. Basically, if you want to know what the book was all about without all the extra details, you can read the report at the end. It tells you exactly what happened (or what they think happened anyway) in the simplest terms possible. It was a major disappointment to spend so much time with this book and then have it end so quickly with very little description in comparison to the rest of the book.

Overall, Life of Pi gets a Coffee, Sugar and Cream, No Flavor rating (or a 2). Although there were a few things I did enjoy about the book, I disliked a great deal of it. And any book that takes me more than a week to read (especially during the summer when I have nothing better to do with my time than read) is not a good book in my opinion.

If you're still interested in reading this book, well, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, however I do encourage everyone to at least attempt it and form your own opinions about it. Don't just take my word for it. And remember, don't judge a book by it's cover, because if you did, you'd have an even harder time wrapping your head around the fact that the lifeboat was big enough to house so many animals as the one described in the book.

Life of Pi is available on Amazon.com if you choose to read it and decide for yourself.
As always, thanks for reading!