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| 1250077753
| 9781250077752
| 1250077753
| 4.16
| 22,877
| Feb 21, 2017
| Feb 21, 2017
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it was ok
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If Sophie Hannah or Sharon Bolton has left you feeling like an idiot, this is your book. Everything you anticipate happens at the end exactly as you e
If Sophie Hannah or Sharon Bolton has left you feeling like an idiot, this is your book. Everything you anticipate happens at the end exactly as you expect. It is the dullest & most predictable book I have read (sort of) in years. At halfway I couldn't bear the plodding pace & jumped to the final chapters (this book has James Patterson sized chapters for easy reading) & it ended just as I'd figured when still at the middle. Only the identity of Zoe's biological father was news, & that because I forgot that novels aren't real life. (In real life her father can be almost any man but in fiction he has to be a character in the story so keep your eye out.) None of the characters has any interesting quirks or passions: each has one & only one distinguishing feature: cancer pt mom with teen dtr suffering crippling anxiety attacks, RN obsessed with infertility, SW with abusive spouse. It also occurred to me that for an RN to have a pt's dtr stay with her while mom recovered would have caused serious Hippa & boundary issues in a real hospital. Also fortunately the ICPL provided a copy, so I'm poorer only for about four hours of time & that wasn't entirely wasted time because it's good to know I have some minimal solving skills.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 08, 2017
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Apr 10, 2017
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Mar 17, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 1786811200
| 9781786811202
| B01NAAQKGF
| 3.70
| 5,020
| Feb 20, 2017
| Feb 22, 2017
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really liked it
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Caregivers are familiar with the triangle that represents the actors in an abusive relationship: the victim, the abuser, & the rescuer. What makes thi
Caregivers are familiar with the triangle that represents the actors in an abusive relationship: the victim, the abuser, & the rescuer. What makes this figure intriguing and an excellent basis for a fictional plot is that the roles are interchangeable. All three can swap places with each other, & often the reader has to wait till the very end to find just who is which. Here we have Claire, a lonely middle-aged schoolteacher who becomes obsessed with ten y/o Lorna, obviously quite bright but from a highly dysfunctional family, who seems to acquire lots of bruises & is generally filthy & poorly dressed. But is she actually being abused? Believing she is, Claire runs off with her to Cornwall, expecting to find a safe & idyllic refuge in the off season. As they are en route, Claire hears on the radio that a fire has destroyed Lorna’s home & family. So Claire simply assumes the role of Lorna’s mother. The location proves much less enjoyable than anticipated, & Lorna a real handful. Then they meet another middle aged woman named Marianne with a mysterious past who claims to be from London & to have an arts background who encourages Lorna to want to be trained as a dancer. Claire keeps needing more & more drink & painkillers to function @ all, & Marianne takes over her role. Then the suspenseful part really gets going. I think the publishers overstated the subtitle: It is hardly in the end “a BRILLIANT Twist” but rather one of a number of possible endings that will have occurred to any reader of this kind of story. I came up with a different one (one that Roald Dahl or Evelyn Waugh would probably have chosen & that is introduced by a character as a fake account of what occurred). But I think most readers will find the chosen ending satisfactory. Whilst I cannot imagine anyone reading this book twice, it leaves a lot to think about, especially about what boundaries teachers (& other caregivers) should observe. It become obvious that Claire is too deeply immeshed tho’ personally I sympathised with her attempt to be the rescuer, @ least in the early stages of the book. The general rule holds here tho’ - it is a very bad sign indeed when you have to hide what you are doing. But whether Claire, or Marianne, is just stupid or something much more sinister, you’ll have to find out for yourself. As you will whether you approve the characters’ fates. I also much appreciated, after slogging away with multiple characters on dual time lines, the simple straight narrative & concentration on three principal characters interacting with each other. It’s not quite perfect for me @ the realistic level. I think a bright 10 y/o could concoct Lorna’s schemes, but it was hard to believe she would have either the physical strength or the concentration of mind to execute them. But they seem believable as they happen & should hold the reader’s attention to the end. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 26, 2017
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Mar 28, 2017
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Feb 26, 2017
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Kindle Edition
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| 3.91
| 12,276
| Mar 15, 2016
| Mar 15, 2016
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really liked it
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Reading Exit, Pursued by a Bear, I was haunted by continual recollections of another school story about a cheer captain, Megan Abbott's Dare Me. Judgi
Reading Exit, Pursued by a Bear, I was haunted by continual recollections of another school story about a cheer captain, Megan Abbott's Dare Me. Judging from the reviews on Amazon, we see Dare Me provokes equally extreme reactions from readers: half love it had half hate it & I expect many who hated Dare Me would love Exit, Pursued. In Dare Me the principal character, Beth, is an indomitable Nietzschian determined never to yield to anyone. Ironically, because Dare Me is a tragedy, Beth's unshakeable will leads to her becoming in the end a victim herself. Hermione in Exit, Pursued is a seeming victim who refuses to allow herself to be used like one; after being drugged and raped @ cheer camp, she receives the support of an entire community, police, doctors, nurses, parents, BFs, psychiatrist, even a clergyman, who is okay with her decision to have an abortion. The differences in flavours between Dare Me & Exit, Pursued emerge clearly in the speeches the captains deliver to their squads just before they go into competition. Both speeches work like King Henry’s before the battle of Agincourt in Shakespeare’s Henry V. This is Hermione, as the Palermo Heights Golden Bears prepare to perform in the Canadian nationals: “Listen up. . . . This is our day. We didn’t have to come across the country or even that far across the province, because this is our day. We’ve practiced for this and trained and thought. . . . Each & every one of you chose to be here. You all chose to try out when the competition was stiff. You chose to give up ever sleeping in so we could practice in the mornings. You chose to limit your social life. You chose to make your teammates your friends as well. And you chose today. I’ve asked a lot of you all on the floor & off this year. And I’m going to ask one more thing. . . . Choose to go out there with me one more time. Choose to do your best. Choose to trust your team. Choose to win, & I know—I know—we can.” And this is Beth @ the Sutton Grove Eagles last game of the season; they've learned that a scout from the regionals is in the stands: “Tonight, you’ve got to spill their blood . . . or I promise you, they will spill yours. . . . Brace those arms. Bolt those knees. Look at that crowd like you’re about to give them the best piece of ass they ever had. Sell it. . . . Bases, eyes on your Flyer, she is yours. You lock her to your heart. You lose her, blood on the mat. She is yours. Make her. . . .You fail, you fail all of us. So you will not fail. . . . So stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood. We’ve come to bury them. We’ve come to plow their bones by the final bell. . . . It’s harvest day, girlies. . . . Get busy when the corn is ripe.” If they were wines, Dare Me is one of those over-oaked powerful Napa high-alcohol Chardonnays with the punch of a depleted-uranium armour-piercing anti-tank round. Exit, Pursued is a light smooth Riesilng. I enjoyed both. I read somewhere that Megan Abbott got her original idea for Dare Me to try to set Macbeth in an American high school, tho' practically no traces remain except for the principal character's first name. Hermione's name & the book title are allusions to The Winter's Tale, one of Shakespeare's later plays that we classify as romances. Tragedy portrays a world that is cruel, excessive & merciless, yet inevitable & right. Appropriately for a book set in Canada, as I was reading Exit, Pursued the presence of the famous Toronto critic Northrop Frye was constant visiting spirit. What makes stories like this romances is that what appear to be tragic resolves happily, the villains are punished but mostly offstage and the apparent victims saved & the lost recovered. If you like, you could say that romance portrays the world as it ought to be. For Frye & for me, the perspective is essentially Christian in that evil is made to reveal a greater good. Some readers hated Beth but I admire her will & her resourcefulness & courage. Sometimes I thought I found Hermione bland, but actually she is very courageous too. Fortunately the author E. K. Johnston portrays a small town in Ontario as part of a society that offers a good system of support of Hermione, & in Polly Hermione has a BF who is everything you could ever want in a friend, whereas Beth’s BF Addy will betray her. That’s the difference between the worlds of romance and of tragedy. But Hermione & Beth are both inspirations & models. When you’re facing something horrible but have family & friends & caregivers, ask yourself what Hermione would do & then get up & have the strength to do it. But when you’re all alone, no one has your back & there’s nothing before you except the abyss staring @ you, do what Beth would do – don’t let the abyss intimidate you, you intimidate the abyss. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 09, 2016
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Dec 25, 2016
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Dec 26, 2016
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Hardcover
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| B00V8RYPJG
| 4.14
| 2,992
| Mar 25, 2015
| Mar 25, 2015
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really liked it
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Taking Flight belongs to the genre we might loosely term the Bell Jars, in which the main character, usually a teenager or undergraduate, is sent to s
Taking Flight belongs to the genre we might loosely term the Bell Jars, in which the main character, usually a teenager or undergraduate, is sent to some kind of custodial facility, for anorexia, drugs, depression, sometimes a more serious criminal offense. In the case of 17-year old Lauren Lennox, technically her problem is habitual truancy assisted by alcohol. Her mother Nicole Erickson was a popular television star who has recently been killed in a car wreck. Her father is another former TV personality now washed up in alcohol. But the real conflict on which this story is centered is not about Lauren’s attendance record, but her sexuality. She is a lesbian, tho’ her orientation is unknown @ first to the foster care farm family to whom she is sent. As Lauren is a Los Angelina whose footwear consists mostly of heels & the Marshall family, whose father David is a psychologist & school counselor, live in rural Georgia on a farm along with homebody wife Wendy, son Scott, & dtr. Cameron – who is a cheerleader & “hot” as well. (I was surprised Lauren is initially confused about Cameron’s gender – surely she’d heard of Cameron Diaz!) In addition to being expected (but not forced) to attend the local Baptist church, Lauren is required to assist with the farm chores, so besides a Bell Jar story we also get some Funny Farm humor, where Lauren’s taste in footgear proves a problem. (I had some trouble believing she’d not have owned @ least a pair of DMs.) Much of the pleasure we get for reading Taking Flight lies in discovering unexpected aspects of the characters (including a horse) & turns in the story, so I am going to skip any analysis of characters & plot, especially as our suspense & concern about how events & relationships will develop drives our appetite in finishing the story. No point in hiding spoilers – this is a one-time feel-good work of romantic fiction. I think most of us will be quite pleased with the denouement, even tho’ in real life - where most of us, unlike Lauren, don’t have trust funds awaiting our 18th birthday (& some who are wealthy make some very stupid choices indeed) - the sort of ending in this story is much harder to negotiate. The question of spirituality is worth a comment too. The bad religion Lauren encounters in Georgia is very noxious indeed & all of us who were raised with that sort of toxic religiosity well understand how liberating it is to escape it, especially for a teen. But religion & spirituality are not the same thing, & there are plenty of forms of spirituality, both Christian & otherwise, that have no problems accepting & affirming everyone’s orientation & identity. If after Lauren & her partner get to New York, should they find they need some spiritual support, I’m sure Saint Luke’s in the Fields would give them a warm welcome. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 11, 2016
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Sep 16, 2016
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Sep 11, 2016
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Kindle Edition
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| 3.34
| 6,591
| Jun 28, 2016
| Jun 28, 2016
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it was amazing
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Reflecting on this lovely book, I became aware that two subtle but major watersheds in English social history had been passed by in my adult lifetime.
Reflecting on this lovely book, I became aware that two subtle but major watersheds in English social history had been passed by in my adult lifetime. Our four principal characters are graduates of the University of Bristol, yet two of them go on to have very high-octane careers, one as a physicist practically on a first-name basis with the Higgs Boson & the other in the London financial sector. In Evelyn Waugh’s, or even in Kingsley Amis’s day, they would necessarily have been Oxbridge graduates, & one of them (the City trader) would not have been a woman. Also, they only discover that the father of one of them (the physicist actually) is a peer when they see the groom designated The Honourable on the invitations to his wedding. In Jane Austen’s era, or even in my youth, that would have been the first thing everyone knew about him. We follow the trajectories of our four friends over a period of two decades from entrance to uni to the threshold of middle age. They are Benedict & Evie, who are reading physics, & Sylvie, an artist, with her brother Lucien, who claims to be an entrepreneur, a euphemism for dope dealer. Evie was reared by Keith, her single-parent socialist father, & she goes against the grain by heading for Canary Wharf & the big bonuses instead of the laboratory. This book could have been a whole series of novels, like A la recherche, A Dance to the Music of Time - both of which I burnt out on fast & early - or Simon Raven’s Alms for Oblivion, which I mostly hugely enjoyed in my youth for its mix of militarism, academism, & cynicism. But as a single novel, Invincible Summer is a perfect epitome. It recalled for me a lot Robin Kirman’s Bradstreet Gate, but much better, tho’ Bradstreet was a solid four star. Part of my preference is an almost indefinable quality that Adams puts into her characters – except for Lucien who very much overworks the loveable scoundrel persona till it lands him where he belongs. They seem to be people I would truly like to have as personal friends. Indeed, by the time I was half-way through, I almost thought that they were. Especially Evie, who emerges as the protagonist. Adams’ account of her career as a bond trader is gripping. The only other novel I’ve read that offers the same opportunity to share vicariously the excitement & eroticism of the trading floor was Nicola Monaghan’s Starfishing. Both authors have worked in the financial sector & have a feel for the action. Best experienced audibly, the scene where Evie is trying to manage the purchase of 900 million (yes, million) Italian government bonds (BTPs) was so suspenseful I nearly crashed the car. The dangerous part is that such a huge buy order will drive the price up to the level that Evie’s firm will lose money (& her bonus & likely her job) on the transaction. The trick is to start buying slowly so the market doesn’t notice that there’s a big movement underway, then just before the market closes for the day, put in a large order to drive the price up @ the close & short the remainder of your transaction. Of course the next day lots of bond holders will take a profit @ the new high price & you can cover your short position @ a profit. But you almost feel you’re wearing Evie’s headset as she talks with her broker. ‘Graham. 95.00 bid in 10.” She’s offering to buy the first ten million @ 95 euros each. “Working that . . . .’ several minutes silence then ‘95.20 lifted, 95.20 to 95.40 following.’ Then the price @ which Evie had to buy keeps going up: ‘Forty lifted. Bid over there, seventy offer on the follow.’ I love the feature where you can get both audible & text on your reader, so I could go back & figure out just what was going on. Of course what Evie is doing is something called “Market Manipulation” & it’s a bit dodgy, tho’ we should keep in mind that in the end all that happens is 30 million euros will be transferred from one financial institution to another & so far as the rest of us are concerned it makes no difference one way or the other. As Dr. Johnson once put it so well, men are never so harmlessly occupied than in making money. Goes for women too. Before it’s all over (& we know it has to end because we are approaching 2008) Evie finds out she was swimming in a shark tank. Besides creating loveable characters, Alice Adams has a gift for felicitous phrasing: my favourite was ‘weapons-grade flirtation’. A hypercritic might complain that her minor characters are a bit flat & stereotyped – I found both Evie’s personal trainer live-in @ her Docklands ‘apartment’ (American is now upscale) boyfriend (like Lou’s in JoJo Moyes but not funny) Julian & her City mentor ‘Big Paul’ an odious fat oaf & she never quite convinced me that Benedict was really a physicist (tho’ even C. P. Snow didn’t know how to do that). Still, Benedict redeemed himself & lived up to his name by showing a real streak of spirituality. Even the child characters are affecting, especially Sylvie’s special-needs daughter. No question. Emotionally Invincible Summer will be my Me Before You for 2016. I hope it may be yours. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 25, 2016
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Aug 28, 2016
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Aug 10, 2016
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Kindle Edition
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| 0615774105
| 9780615774107
| 0615774105
| 3.37
| 914
| Dec 13, 2013
| Dec 16, 2013
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it was ok
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Purgatorium sets a record for me in hiding its genre. When @ about 90% it still might have turned out to be any of the following: A story set @ a men
Purgatorium sets a record for me in hiding its genre. When @ about 90% it still might have turned out to be any of the following: A story set @ a mental or behavioral treatment facility with role-playing therapeutic games, - Bell Jar country or like Paperweight - which I’ve already reviewed. (2) A dystopian fiction set on an island run by a mad scientist - a sort of psychiatric Island of Dr. Moreau. (3) A visit to a haunted island peopled by ghosts - as in F. G. Cottam’s The Colony. (4) An account of a teenaged suicide’s soul in a sort of contemporary version of Dante’s Purgatorio or C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. Any of these scenarios would fit the title. As the book progressed some of these plots seem more likely than others, but only @ the end do we know for sure what is really going on. As we are distinctly told about the Milgram & Stanford prison experiments & that the psychologist in charge of what happens on the island had previously been sacked from the Harvard faculty for unethical research, I was plumping for no. 2. (view spoiler)[In fact, it turns out to be no. 1. The facility is on the up & up, Daphne, with the help of some neo-pagan role-playing overcomes her suicidal desires & is reconciled with her parents & ex-boyfriend. In real life the logistics of setting up such a treatment plan would be hugely expensive & I cannot imagine an insurance company whose health-care coverage would be sufficient, even if many of the actors, who play ghosts & victims were volunteers who’d previously been successfully teated, as we find out finally. (hide spoiler)] Daphne, a 15 y/o from Texas, has been sent in the company of a schoolfriend who claims to have previously been treated there to an island off the coast of California well-stocked with sea lions, whales, & foxes with GPS devices & cameras in their tails. She is suffering from suicidal impulses brought on by guilt for her failure to prevent her schizophrenic younger brother’s killing her younger sister who’d annoyed Daphne by wearing her favorite Hollister shirt. Really! Daphne failed to warn her because she was a slugabed & didn’t bother to get up & stop him. But she decides to give herself over to the island adventure before carrying out her plan of ending her life. For me Daphne lacked the appeal of a Taylor Markham (On the Jellicoe Road). Daphne has the vulnerability & diffidence we appreciate in the MC in a YA (or for me, any story), & she is capable of some bravery and resourcefulness. But she never came alive as a whole person & now only about 48 hrs. after reading Purgatorium, more & more improbabilities keep coming to mind. I fear this one has a very short shelf life. Good moral values & intentions, but weak execution. It will set back my goal of a 4.5 star year. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 06, 2016
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Jan 10, 2016
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Jan 06, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0778317706
| 9780778317708
| 0778317706
| 3.71
| 62,806
| Jul 28, 2015
| Jul 28, 2015
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really liked it
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When I first finished Pretty Baby, I thought it badly overwritten, full of clichés “like fingernails scraping on a chalkboard” & unnecessary details (
When I first finished Pretty Baby, I thought it badly overwritten, full of clichés “like fingernails scraping on a chalkboard” & unnecessary details (such as the “pink panties” & “kitten heels” we’re told three times by a character who was wearing them when she was going to commit adultery with a man whose jeans she tells us twice had a “brass button” @ the waistband). I thought that either these characters are total materialists or the author believed that supplying more extraneous information made her story more vivid. But despite its seemingly unendurably jarring style, this story totally consumed me. I had to know how it ended, particularly to find out the fates of Heidi & of Willow. Getting a take on the characters proved immensely difficult, as if each had an evil twin. Schematically somewhat like this: Heidi: Compassionate caregiver devoted to good causes, loyal spouse & attentive mother. Encounters a teenaged waif with infant & takes them into her home, tho’ that proves more demanding than the most we might have anticipated. Chris: Hardworking investment manager. Prudent, conventional & realistic, perhaps lacking in imagination but well-intentioned & protective of wife & daughter. Zoe: dtr of above. Preteen @ awkward stage. Willow: angelic 16 y/o victim of terrible abuse, loving towards mother, sister, & baby Ruby, honest, intelligent, & intellectually curious (devoured Omaha public library). Or: Heidi: Total bleeding heart obsessed with children & motherhood - as well as stray cats - & tormented by inability to have more children & with the memory of the pregnancy she had to terminate. Borderline delusional & then some. Chris: Coarse philistine. Expresses himself in crude language (thinks Heidi should have “kicked [Willow] to the curb”), uncaring & selfish. Slob who sits around in his underwear watching sports & CNN business news on TV, wears Chicago Bears paraphernalia in the bedroom, & majored in business & never reads anything but the Wall Street Journal. Borderline paranoid. Zoe: dtr of above. Selfish spoiled brat. Willow: teenage psychopath, wanted by police for murder & other things. But for me, Heidi & Willow (along with Willow’s boyfriend Matthew) were most lovable & I cared totally for them, Chris was a boor but very limited rather than bad, & as for Zoe - you could say that both descriptions above are the same in different words. Then we get to the baddies, Louise Flores the bullying public prosecutor, & finally to Willow’s foster parent Joseph, the most totally depraved, evil, & disgusting character I’ve encountered in recent fiction (& that number includes some serial killers who enjoyed torturing their victims). So I finished the book last night wondering how I could find such an ineptly written & told story so gripping & how many stars to give it. Early this morning, as I was doing my spiritual exercises, the coin - more like the whole treasury - dropped. It’s Christmas week, Duh! A homeless teenaged girl & her baby are wandering the Chicago streets & a kind woman, one who knows bereavement well & recognizes in the baby the daughter she ought to have, takes them into her home & cares for them. Then, as happens when the Divine Presence enters & takes over our lives, everything is completely upset & upended, the callous & uncaring are scandalized & want to call on the authorities (King Herod, perhaps.) to deal with this stranger girl & her infant that’s threatening respectable people’s children like Zoe. (Were he literate, Heidi’s husband Chris would agree with every word of King Herod’s speech in Auden’s For the Time Being.) On the theological level, it makes absolute sense that the horrible pedophile is named Joseph & his catatonic spouse Miriam (the Hebrew original for Mary, of course) - they are The Unholy Family - & his favorite punishment for Willow was making her copy out passages from Leviticus & Deuteronomy & his bad son named Isaac & the good one named Matthew. (Old Law & New Law, of course.) So no wonder this story was nonstop unputdownable sheer perfect - on the archetypal level, it’s not just a five star - it’s Star of Bethlehem class. It is a beautiful tale about hospitality. Ubi caritas & amor . . . Still, I have to hold the stars to four. Even the admirable characters are too flat, the prose too clunky, & the language too cliched, for true artistic excellence. But on the moral & spiritual level, Pretty Baby belongs in the top echelon. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 17, 2015
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Dec 21, 2015
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Dec 17, 2015
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Hardcover
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| B013YL33R8
| 4.28
| 766
| Oct 30, 2015
| Oct 30, 2015
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really liked it
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Hard to believe it’s been but two years since I read Somewhere to Hide & fell in love with Cath Mason, who’s the house supervisor of a refuge for vict
Hard to believe it’s been but two years since I read Somewhere to Hide & fell in love with Cath Mason, who’s the house supervisor of a refuge for victims of domestic abuse, & who is both a believable & vulnerable person & the closest thing to a saint you’re likely to encounter in this life. Since then Mel Sherratt has published three other books set on the Mitchell Estate in the English Midlands. Written in the Scars is her latest & the author was kind enough to supply me with an advance e-copy. The residents of the estate can be divided into four classes: @ the bottom are the scoundrels, the out-&-out criminals - drug dealers, car thieves, burglars, most of whom have spent some time ‘banged up inside’. Then we have the skivers, idlers who draw benefit. One of them, Nick, describes his ‘between jobs’ status: ‘Have been for near on five years now. As long as the government keep paying me to stay @ home, that’s where I’ll stay. . . . I’m not getting out of bed to earn six pounds an hour.’ As another character remarks: ‘Half the women on this estate walk around in their pyjamas & slippers.’ But I would describe Sherratt’s principal characters as strivers. We have Donna, a 40-something single-mum with a 22 y/o son Sam & 19 y/o daughter, Keera. Sam about half-way between skiver & scoundrel. He’s nearly cut off a finger with a chainsaw whilst clearing a path to pilfer from a building site. Keera is terrified lest her mother discover that she is working @ The Candy Club as a masseuse No sex is involved, but there are always customers eager for extras. Another striver is Megan, who works as a cleaner @ the hospital & @ a care home. (I have the privilege to meet people in her line of work almost every day.) Megan hides a disfiguring birthmark under mascara & falls in love with Sam whilst he’s in hospital. We also follow Lewis, an ex-army Afghanistan veteran who’s treating PTSD with ETOH & risking GBH. Only one of Mel Sherratt’s really saintly characters plays a role in this novel, Josie Mellor, the housing officer who was the principal character in Behind a Closed Door, the second book of the series. I love this series because the author portrays very ordinary people attractively, so that you really care about what happens to them. Sometimes they make really stupid choices, as does Donna when - urged on by her friend & co-worker Sarah -she goes off for a fling with Owen, a man she barely knows. When you’re Donna’s age & you find an attractive man who just happens to seem unattached & available - there is probably a good reason that you’ll want to find out before getting involved. As Sarah had been eager to hear all the details, I think Donna should have unloaded on her just what happened @ the fancy hotel with Owen. Might have helped Sarah acquire a more grown-up attitude towards relationships. If it looks too good to be true . . . Written in the Scars did not have as much appeal for me as the first two books in the series (I’ve not read Fighting for Survival yet). I miss Cath & Josie plays only a supporting role here, as an angel for Lewis. In Somewhere to Hide & in some Allie Shenton mysteries, Mel Sherratt wraps up the story very fast & think that happens here too, especially for Lewis & for Megan. She should indeed be good for Sam but I wasn’t entirely persuaded that he’d be good for her. Tho’ I think Mel Sherratt is really flourishing in the detective story genre, & I want to start following Marcie Steele @ well, the Mitchell Estate remains closest to my heart as a place to meet characters whom I love, speaking a bit differently but whom I’ve come to recognise almost as neighbours & friends. And in the case of caregivers like Cath & Josie & Megan, as models & exemplars as well. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 11, 2015
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Oct 30, 2015
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Oct 01, 2015
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Kindle Edition
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| 0718179617
| 9780718179618
| 0718179617
| 3.74
| 392,797
| Sep 23, 2015
| Jan 01, 2015
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it was amazing
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Me Before You was a wonderful account of a beautiful & most unusual love affair, tragic but shot through with side-splittingly comic episodes. It also
Me Before You was a wonderful account of a beautiful & most unusual love affair, tragic but shot through with side-splittingly comic episodes. It also stretched my take on moral & spiritual issues. I’d thought I had a solid grasp on medical euthanasia (not a good idea), but Will’s choice what to do with his life & Lou’s decision to support it simply felt right to me. As we follow Louisa’s story in After You, my feelings - & hers - became a lot less sure. Basically, Will thought his quadriplegic condition made him unable to provide Lou the sexual relationship that she deserved & that he could not live subjecting her to such an unsatisfying future. He left her a legacy to enable her to have a full & rich life, & to live in Paris. It seemed a beautiful bittersweet ending, with Will free from being entrapped in an almost useless body & sacrificing himself to give Lou freedom both from being bound to caring for him & of being submerged in lower-middle-class provincial life. But now we wonder If Will actually made the right decision. There are other ways to love besides providing sex (@ least one hopes!) & now we see what a huge chasm Will’s death has left in Louisa’s existence. After You is set 18 months later - the interval is exactly right, as readers who work with the bereaved notice immediately. Everybody grieves differently & we don’t pass through stages of grief like coach passengers going from one station to the next according to a fixed schedule. Yet two years for coping with a major loss is pretty typical. Just as Me Before You was an excellent portrayal of the pains & rewards of being a caregiver, so this book well depicts Louisa’s experience with the process of grief. Paris proved most unsatisfying without Will. Being bereaved is very much like like being in jail - you have the funds & the leisure to go wherever you dreamt of, but what’s the point without someone you love to share it with? (A reason some of us become homebodies.) Louisa is now living in an almost empty east London flat, working @ a ‘Mac-job’ waitressing @ an airport bar with an insufferable boss. She’s joined a grief support group whose members succeed in being simultaneously eccentric & boringly ordinary whose leader sounds like a time-traveller from northern California or Tavistock Square ca. 1970. (Reminded me of some clinical pastoral education supervisors one encounters.) Then Louisa literally falls off the roof & into a new life. I know people who’ve succeeded @ informally adopting troubled teenagers with dysfunctional families, provided a safe place to stay & the adult supervision, boundaries, & encouragement young people need to achieve a successful formation. Such a caring relationship is @ once difficult without any legal authority or biological connexion, but it provides something every young person - even those of us who had good parents - needs, a close relationship with an adult who is not a parent, who can model what a mature person is meant to be. In this case the 15-y/o Lily is the daughter that Will never knew he had, & Lou finds herself performing the role of the caring adult. Jojo Moyes achieves a perfect example of what a neo-classical French drama critic would call ‘preservation of character’; Lou continues to find her centre as a caregiver, but in a wholly different role & relationship. And it is equally appropriate that Louisa’s new romantic relationship should be with another caregiver, Sam the paramedic, for whom Louisa falls. (Sorry, couldn’t resist!) He is also recovering from grief for a sister who died of cancer. Of course, after Will, Sam is a much more conventional hero for a work of romantic fiction, but having the honour to work with people like Sam & his partner Donna in real life, I have a strong bias in his favour (were I but a few years younger I’d be thinking about yet another career . . .). I find too often that Jojo Moyes’s principal males lack character (I expected much more of Paul in The Girl You Left Behind & had major problems with Anthony in The Last Letter from Your Lover), so feel Sam is about the minimum that Louisa (& any good woman) deserves - what I’d term a ‘decent’ man. The opposite end of the masculine spectrum is represented by the characters Peter & by Mr Garside, who contest the order of precedence between a scumbag & a slimeball in this book Tho’ she creates believable villains, a spiritual quality in Jojo Moyes’ stories that I find uplifting if her ability to find goodness in very ordinary minor characters who for other writers would be throwaways or satiric butts. The Moving On Circle grief support group seems full of self-centred (that’s what grief does to us) grumps facilitated by the parody of a caring person. But as it turns out, the group does what it’s supposed to do & the members bond with each other & heal - quite unlike the satiric teenage cancer support group in John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars that seems to be there for readers to feel superior to. Louisa’s odious boss @ the Irish-theme airport bar reveals genuine humanity & sister Treena’s there when needed. I had some problems with the story: The blocking misunderstanding in the relationship between Louisa & Sam seemed very contrived, that a selfish person like Tanya would have continued the pregnancy seemed unlikely, & Lou’s mum’s discovery of feminism & her dad’s MCP response was very anachronistic even in Britain (they’re only supposed to be in their 50s - they’d have been teenagers when Germaine Greer & Marilyn French were in fashion). But most especially I simply cannot believe that an EMT team like Sam & Donna would ever allow a civilian like Lou to accompany them on a call. Not ever. But with a 1st-person narrator you have to cut an author some slack. The other details of EMT work seemed quite accurate, @ least as I’ve observed them both in the ER & from the back of an ambulance. How should I rate this book? You’ve already read a bunch of reviews telling us that After You is not as good as Me Before You. They’re right. It’s not. But then Me Before You was the best new novel to be published two years in a row, for 2012 in Britain, 2013 in America. Compared with other novels I’ve enjoyed & learned from about caregiving & relationships, After You is well up with the top echelon. I’ll go the whole five stars. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 30, 2015
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Oct 11, 2015
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Sep 30, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 006233574X
| 9780062335746
| 006233574X
| 3.90
| 16,396
| Jul 02, 2015
| Jul 07, 2015
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liked it
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It’s never fair to criticize an author for not writing the book that the reviewer prefers that she’d written instead of the one she actually intended
It’s never fair to criticize an author for not writing the book that the reviewer prefers that she’d written instead of the one she actually intended to write. But I think it is fair to advert potential readers to what I found missing in Paperweight. The principal character & narrator is being treated for anorexia. Welcome to Bell Jar country: whatever the main character’s diagnosis - depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, anorexia, PTSD - the plot trajectories have to be pretty much the same whether the character is a British infantry officer @ a sanatorium in Scotland in 1918 or as here a 17 year old girl from the Atlanta suburbs @ a facility in New Mexico. It will end with the main character dead (as in effect does The Bell Jar because we know the author’s fate), a permanent invalid (like Ivor Gurney or a rock star who keeps going in & out of rehab), or “cured” or “recovered” & able to resume a more or less “normal” life. Here our narrator & principal character Stephanie - she insists on being called Stevie - believes that she was responsible for the death of her brother Joshua in a car smash & is trying to die of starvation in expiation. Stevie’s motives were what I liked most about Meg Haston’s Paperweight & made her an attractive character. Too often anorexia is presented as an infectious disease that susceptible (& presumably materialistic & unintelligent) girls contract from magazine advertisements, photos of Victoria Beckman & of bikini models with gaps between their thighs, as well as clothes sized 0. In my career as a teacher I got to know a number of young women who’d struggled with this condition & found them amongst the most sensitive & intelligent students I’d the privilege of encountering. Both anorexia & self-harming are reactions to a culture obsessed with hedonism & consumption - where thrift is regarded as an economic sin that creates unemployment & obesity is epidemic & your local supermarket packed with people with full shopping trolleys & bad figures. In Medieval times, many anorexics would be canonized saints & as for cutters - well, there’s a reason some saints were called stigmatics. In Paperweight “treatment” (no definite or indefinite article) is based mostly on materialistic & behaviorist assumptions. Stevie has “an eating disorder” (@ one point I realized that I suffered from “a living room disorder” BTW) & her therapist (whom Stevie refers to as “Shrink”) assures Stevie that “you are not your eating disorder” & that instead of dying for her brother she should “live for Joshua,” but never described what living for somebody, especially somebody who’s dead, might mean. To me that might be: Stevie should try to become the person Josh would want her to be, or she should try to become the best person she can be, or (if theological language makes sense) she should become the person God wants her to be. (These are actually different ways of viewing exactly the same thing.) The unstated message in this book seems to be: you should co-operate with ‘treatment’ because it will please the staff & you will be given privileges like going horseback riding & then you’ll be cured. I am sure that is not what the author intends: she strikes me as a very compassionate caregiver, but without much spiritual perception. My other problem with the book was with Stevie’s relationships. Her mother, a high-powered international lawyer has deserted her father, a laid-back writer, to live & work in Europe with her lover, leaving Stevie & Joshua to live with him in a squalid apartment she terms Villa Crapeau! In a writing class Stevie acquired a new friend, an older girl named Eden, and became Eden’s protégée. Eden is a buddy with the local bands & bartenders & introduces Stevie to some sophisticated pleasures as well as trying to create a triangular relationship to include Joshua. But tho’ I could easily understand the attraction an older worldly friend has for a 17 year old, the solution this book offered struck me as much too simplistic. Surely the cure for bad relationships consists in more than simply ending them. For most of us, even bad friends are better than being alone, which is why we so often relapse into old habits. We need to put something better in their stead. As this book ends I still wondered what is supposed to fill the places in Stevie’s life that ought to be taken by her mother, her brother, & her best friend. This absence seemed to me a very serious flaw. As an account of usual treatment for anorexia, Paperweight is an interesting read & Stevie sympathetic & Shrink likeable when she’s not spouting therapeutic jargon. But as a reader looking for spiritual values & eager to savor the qualities of relationships, I found this book suffers from its own variety of anorexia. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 25, 2015
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Aug 04, 2015
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Jul 25, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 1786810417
| 9781786810410
| B00I77X49C
| 4.10
| 4,653
| Feb 01, 2014
| Jul 11, 2016
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really liked it
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What could be better for sharing than a book about relationships? As the title The Middle Child suggests, this is the story of three siblings; Cather
What could be better for sharing than a book about relationships? As the title The Middle Child suggests, this is the story of three siblings; Catherine is the eldest, Alex the youngest sister, with Beth between them. Their horribly abusive mother has finally come to her most unlamented end. When the girls were young, mother seized on any excuse to beat them, despised all their accomplishments, & predicted they’d come to nothing. Each chose a different path. Catherine, determined to prove her mother wrong, has become a high-flying advertising account exec, married with two children. Alex followed the downward path her mother foretold as an alcoholic barmaid up to her ears in debt, the duration of whose drunken lesbian relationships can be measured in hours & minutes, one of which results in two tops beating the shit out of her. But Beth has remained the homebody who stayed with mum as her principal care giver & is apparently in a state of denial about being abused, even referring to a terrible burn mark her mother left as the result of an ‘accident’. Angela Marsons relates their story in 3rd person limited POV, alternating chapters centring on Alex & Catherine. I had previously read Marsons’ detective novels The Silent Scream & Evil Games, featuring Kim Stone, who is also estranged from a highly abusive mother. But so far what has struck me most about that series is Kim’s absence of relationships - she seems to get on best with her motorbikes. So I tried one of Marsons’ earlier efforts to see how the author did with relationships & am glad I did. The Middle Child is not what we regard as crime fiction (altho’ it features child abuse & GBH, both of course crimes), but is really a story of the toxic effects of childhood abuse & the power of love to effect reconciliation & healing. Sometimes a book’s aesthetic imperfections give it authenticity & power that a more artistically finished work lacks. I think such is very much the case with The Middle Child. Were I teaching contemporary fiction, I’d not assign it. But I should love to discuss it in a clinical pastoral education or education for ministry class. The Middle Child is a great portrayal of family dynamics. In the terms used to analyse family dynamics, both Catherine & Alex were ‘under-performing’ & Beth was ‘over-performing’ to compensate for them. Alex & Catherine are each in her own way eaten alive by hatred & resentment towards their mother & each other - Alex because Catherine deserted her sisters instead of staying & protecting them & Catherine for Alex’s utterly shambolic life. Beth’s motives & thoughts can be discerned only from her sisters’ POVs. As the characters did not emerge for me as individual distinctive persons, ‘“point” of view’ seems an apt expression because they are like points on geometrically laid-out story lines. Not only did I find myself drawing lines in my imagination between the sisters, but with each to their own families, friends & lovers, with broken lines for the estranged relationships. But these novelistic flaws lay bare the underlying dynamics of this family. That’s why I’d love to be part of a group read for this book with caregivers. I’d expect great insights. In my class-room days I’d have found the ending OTT emotional but now I feel it is very appropriate. For The Middle Child depicts not only the healing power of love, but love’s limits as well. ...more |
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1
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Jul 15, 2015
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Aug 13, 2015
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Apr 27, 2015
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Kindle Edition
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| unknown
| 3.95
| 1,282
| Apr 01, 2013
| Apr 11, 2013
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really liked it
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I’ve been postponing reviewing this book for several weeks because my feelings are quite mixed. Rebecca Wait seems someone I’d quite like & admire if
I’ve been postponing reviewing this book for several weeks because my feelings are quite mixed. Rebecca Wait seems someone I’d quite like & admire if I knew her, & in The View on the Way Down she is quiet, understated, but extremely effective. As a study in how a suicide affects a family, this book appealed to me even more than Miriam Toews’ s All My Puny Sorrows, partly because Toews’s characters seem to be constantly knocking themselves out to be ‘characters’ whereas Wait’s are allowed to be very ordinary & that is an aspect of this book I loved. Ordinary people experience grief every bit as intensely as ‘characters’ (& famous literary intellectuals too) & Wait gives us a very true portrait of what happens when members of a family deal with loss in all the wrong ways. In caregiving we distinguish six stages in the process of recovering from loss: you need to recognise, react, recollect, relinquish, readjust & reinvest. Rose & Joe, the mum & dad, haven’t even dealt with the beginning two stages, pretending to their daughter Emma that Kit’s death was an accident. Kit’s room is kept just as it was when he was a teenager & Rose devotes herself to preparing meals full of calories & carbs which only aggravate poor Emma’s weight issues that make her the laughingstock of her school. Joe simply doesn’t talk about it & spends all his leisure time in his woodworking shop, neglecting his work as a solicitor. He is totally estranged from his other son, Kit’s slightly younger brother Jamie. Tho’ Toews’s family were poisoned by religious toxicity, Joe believes in nothing @ all. He thinks of backaches & headaches as ‘a cross he had to bear’ then we’re told: ‘He hated the way religious language invaded everyday speech. Reminded him of Emma’s religious craze, which thankfully seemed to have dampened down in recent months.’ I’d say that in Meyers-Briggs terms Joe is an off the charts ISTJ & woodworking is an appropriate hobby for him - he has about as much spirituality as a chair. Jamie, whom we discover has some reason to be afflicted by guilt, has buried himself in a dead-end job in a bookstore & treats his girlfriend abominably. When he does attempt to become reconciled with his father, Joe ignores his efforts. In some respects parts of this story are a kind of reverse parable of the prodigal son: when Jamie attempts to rise & go to his father, father isn’t having any. My principal problem with The View on the Way Down was with Kit, the elder brother who commits suicide. Had I been Jamie, my issue with grief would have been that I wasn’t entirely displeased that Kit was dead. He is constantly superior, patronising & overbearing, even in the flashback scene @ the beginning of the story where they’re boys playing on the beach. I found the scene in the pub where Kit humiliates Jamie in front of his friend Sam painful reading, Virtually all suicides are squalid affairs, but Kit’s is particularly bathetic & he needn’t have made Jamie complicit. (Jamie of course should have called 999 - there are some things you just do however sympathetic he may feel with Kit’s desire to end the psychic pain.) However the book gripped me all the way through to a resolution that I could both believe & accept. So I thought that whilst Rebecca Wait’s characters displayed some flaws & inconsistencies that made it hard for me to empathise with them, she really gets it so far as the effects of grief are concerned. She has a new book coming out & I look forward to reading it.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 21, 2015
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Mar 29, 2015
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Mar 21, 2015
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||||
| 1477821856
| 9781477821855
| 1477821856
| 4.22
| 2,746
| Feb 10, 2015
| Feb 10, 2015
|
it was amazing
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If you can, I’d recommend you listen to Follow the Leader on the Audible recording. That might seem an expensive way to enjoy a book, but really, woul
If you can, I’d recommend you listen to Follow the Leader on the Audible recording. That might seem an expensive way to enjoy a book, but really, wouldn’t you be happy to pay about $2 / hour for someone to travel with you & tell you a great story whilst you’re rounding? I certainly am. (In this case Amazon was pricing it @ $1.99 for the whole book so I felt like I was being paid to sit there & listen!) Anne Flosnik doesn’t exactly narrate the story in Potteries dialect (which I reckon was probably dying out by the middle of the last century) but her pronunciation (“look” & “Luke” are homophones) gives us the northern flavour this story needs. Moral & spiritual values are Mel Sherratt’s strong suits, but setting & social class play important supporting roles in her stories. When I find myself not only liking & being concerned for a principal character, but wanting actively to protect her, take her side, & model @ least parts of my behaviour on hers, I’ve found an author whose work I’ll love. And like with Cathy & Josie in Mel Sherratt’s Estate series, in the case of Follow My Leader you’d do well when you feel out of your depth to ask what would Allie Shenton do, & then do it. I think the author’s touch surer than before & Allie has grown morally & spiritually. Her attraction to Terry Ryder in Taunting the Dead had me worried for her, but that sleaze-ball is now a lifetime guest of Her Majesty tho’ still running his car theft operation from his cell. Policing can be as much a form of caregiving as nursing, but unfortunately those aspects tend not to make very good crime stories - Lacey Flint’s work with the Sapphire Team in Sharon Bolton’s Now You See Me could have been the basis for an excellent story but we needed a serial killer (& what a serial killer!) really to get our pulses racing & here that is true as well. Follow the Leader is a pure thriller & all the better for that. To distinguish: a classic mystery is about finding the identity of the perpetrator of a crime, a whodunit - tho’ sometimes it may be about finding something else, like a lost person or an object such as a document or a gem. Contrariwise, in the classic thriller we know the identity of the villain pretty much from the get-go & the issues are who victims will be & how to bring an end to the villain’s bad-hattery. Here the malefactor is in some ways very sympathetic - the victim of terrible childhood abuse both @ home & @ school. Most of the serial killer’s victims don’t quite come up (or down?) to the level of people who really need killing but they’re definitely not going to be missed. But the killer himself has been so corroded by obsession with old grievances that we have no sympathy for him & very much want to see Allie & her team stop him. There sometimes comes a point when an author we’ve been enjoying seems to break through from very good to excellent & I believe with Follow the Leader that Mel Sherratt has reached the goal. I am now going to be reading Diaries from the Estate - I’ve been missing Cathy & Josie a lot. One hint for Mel Sherratt: for my entire career of reading & watching detective & crime stories the S/Os of police officers have been wingeing constantly & boringly: ‘you care more about your job than you do about me’ & now Allie’s husband Mark is doing that. I suggest Allie remind him that he knew she was a cop when he married her & if that doesn’t stop his whining, maybe some bad-hat aiming @ Allie should hit the wrong target by mistake. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 10, 2015
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Mar 14, 2015
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Feb 09, 2015
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 006218363X
| 9780062183637
| 006218363X
| 3.61
| 25,155
| Jul 09, 2013
| Jul 09, 2013
|
it was amazing
|
True crime books are a lot different from detective fiction. Even the most hackneyed & clichéd mystery novel ultimately upholds our belief in a world
True crime books are a lot different from detective fiction. Even the most hackneyed & clichéd mystery novel ultimately upholds our belief in a world where evil, however unacceptable, can be dealt with, explained, & set right. But with real crimes we’re appalled by the unnecessary suffering inflicted on the victims & disgusted with the murderer even when found & punished. And when he remains undetected there seems a mysterious hole in our world. That’s so with the murderer known only as the Gilgo Beach Serial Killer, who may have committed as many as 10 murders. Lost Girls focusses on five victims, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, & Amber Costello, whose bodies wrapped in burlap were found, apparently carefully planted, alongside the ocean parkway on the Long Island shore. There was a fifth girl, Shannan Gilbert, whose body was found in the wild not far away, but it’s unclear that she was a victim of the same killer, or even was murdered. All were prostitutes who found their clients on Craig’s List, but so far as we know had nothing else in common except their fates. The first part gives us the backstories of the victims, telling how they came from Norwich, Connecticut, Buffalo, New York, Ellenville, New York, Portland, Maine, & Wilmington, North Carolina, to take up the life they did & to find death between July 2007 & September 2010. In crime novels the victims’ histories prepare us for what will happen to them. Here the absence of resolution makes Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, frustrating but almost an obsession. We learn nothing from the victims’ stories that tells us anything about the murderer except that he probably lives on Long Island, patronizes prostitutes, & may be attracted by petite women - three of the girls were under 5”. Serial killers seem often to have a particular physical type that triggers their urge to murder. In the latter part of the book Kolker describes the discovery of their remains, the finding of remains of other possible victims of the same killer, as well as those aspects of the investigation that the authorities are willing to disclose, & the efforts of the victims’ families & friends to keep their memories alive & to find the killer. It seem an anticlimax but that’s not the author’s fault. The murders may never be solved & often serial killers who specialize in easy targets such as prostitutes are caught only when a potential victim escapes & identifies the criminal. The kinds of forensic miracles we expect weekly on CSI are all too rare in real investigations, tho’ it’s hard to believe the authorities don’t know from post-mortem examination more about the circumstances of the girls’ deaths than they seem to be telling. Kolker tells their story very well but I wish there were pictures of the victims. Fortunately there is a memorial on Facebook for them & some other internet sites with pictures. I find the photos of Maureen & Amber particularly haunting. So far as I could tell from the book, Amber is the only one of the victims who seems to have had any sort of spiritual life, & had been an active church member @ times. Maureen may have had some psychic gifts & premonitions in dreams. We come away from Lost Girls feeling that however messy & disordered their lives may have been, these girls deserved our love & respect, & that we should join their families & friends in mourning & remembering them. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 10, 2014
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Aug 24, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 1477849939
| 9781477849934
| 1477849939
| 3.87
| 1,206
| Jan 14, 2014
| Aug 12, 2014
|
really liked it
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It's hard to decide just how many stars to give this one - it perfectly accomplishes what it sets out to do, but I'm not quite sure what that was, whe
It's hard to decide just how many stars to give this one - it perfectly accomplishes what it sets out to do, but I'm not quite sure what that was, whether to be a light-weight work of romantic fiction or to be a self-help book for off-the-charts introverts. If you're looking for either (or like me are a romantic who feels awkward in social situations) you'll think the principal character quite delightful, if you can accept someone who's almost 30 being so total an ingenue. In a lot of respects Katrina (who's renamed Kat in New York) seems to be 29 going on 16, but then isn't there a 16 y/o buried in each of us ready to emerge when we're embarrassed? I have no idea if Maria Murnane consciously modelled Katwalk on Burney's Evelina, or whether it's just that this basic romance plot is deeply entrenched in our unconscious. But as in reading Evelina we have a strong sense that we want to protect the heroine & can almost feel our own faces burn when she commits a faux pas or thinks she has. I suspect finding affordable places to stay & friends as fun & good-hearted as Kat's new housemates is rather trickier in real-life New York. (Her new friends sure can drink tho'& one is a bit of a potty mouth.) Morally Kat has her head screwed on very straight tho' she's tempted by an attractive el sleazo & she gains some good new spiritual insights from one of her new friends who is a yoga instructor. But I'll hold @ 4 stars because you can't live only on a diet of chocolate soufflés. But it's a very good soufflé.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 22, 2014
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Aug 26, 2014
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Aug 22, 2014
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1909490377
| 9781909490376
| 1909490377
| 4.04
| 12,078
| Jun 01, 2014
| Jun 2014
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I don't often tell anybody when I DNF but it's not the book but me. At about 1/3 the coin dropped & I keyed the name of a disease into the search func
I don't often tell anybody when I DNF but it's not the book but me. At about 1/3 the coin dropped & I keyed the name of a disease into the search function. Ding! A little too close to what I do in real life for romantic reading.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 26, 2014
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Sep 04, 2014
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Aug 18, 2014
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ebook
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| 4.26
| 745
| Oct 15, 2012
| Dec 13, 2013
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it was amazing
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Aug 11, 2014
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Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||||
| 3.99
| 1,193
| Jun 29, 2012
| Dec 19, 2013
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it was amazing
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Aug 11, 2014
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Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0060569662
| 9780060569662
| 0060569662
| 3.97
| 28,934
| Jan 01, 1994
| Mar 18, 2003
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it was amazing
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Lucy Grealy was a poet, essayist, and autobiographer. She was born in Dublin in 1963 and her family immigrated to Spring Valley, New York, when she wa
Lucy Grealy was a poet, essayist, and autobiographer. She was born in Dublin in 1963 and her family immigrated to Spring Valley, New York, when she was four years old. Her father worked in television. Lucy was a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and received an MFA degree from the University of Iowa Creative Writing Program (the “Writer’s Workshop”). The crucial experience in Lucy’s life happened at age nine, when as a result of a playground accident to her jaw, she was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, an especially aggressive and usually lethal form of cancer. Lucy underwent repeated stays in hospital and outpatient treatments with radiation and chemotherapy. The chemo treatments were especially painful and left her feeling nauseated and physically wrecked. But the treatment was successful, at least with respect to the cancer. But it was to destroy most of Lucy’s right lower jaw, as well as costing Lucy most of her teeth, so that throughout her life she couldn’t close her mouth normally, eat solid food, or kiss. Her mutilated face made her the butt of cruel teasing by other children, and she saw herself as an ugly monstrosity that no one would ever love. Autobiography of a Face is her memoir, recounting Lucy’s life from childhood into her twenties. It was published in 1994 to considerable critical acclaim and is still in print. When literary figures, such as Joan Didion, write books about grief and loss, these are usually reviewed by other writers. But as reading Autobiography of a Face, we felt challenged to try to understand Lucy’s experiences not from a literary point of view, but as trained chaplains and spiritual care givers. Unless specifically assigned to a pediatric unit, a chaplain is unlikely to see a pediatric patient except with a referral from the child’s mother. And quite often, especially in the case of young children, most of our pastoral care is devoted to supporting the parent, not the child. For Lucy the situation was particularly tricky. As a nine year old she was mature enough to be very conscious of what was happening to her, but too young to be taken seriously by adults. And the support she received from her parents was anything but helpful. Lucy received chemo on Fridays, which then involved two very painful injections administered by a physician while he was distracted by talking on the telephone. Outpatients are very poorly cared for by spiritual care departments, which are just not set up for them. Of course if one of us knows we are scheduled for a procedure and want some spiritual support, we’d arrange ahead of time to meet a chaplain at the clinic. But then we know our way around a hospital. It appears that during all the time she was treated at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, Lucy and her family never saw a chaplain, Presbyterian or otherwise. Why couldn’t a nurse or a receptionist have got in touch with pastoral care and said, “We’ve got nine year old girl who’s having some very painful chemo treatments, and she and her mother are usually kept waiting for a couple of hours every Friday afternoon. Could you drop by the waiting room and see if you can do anything for them?” Lucy’s mother seems only to have exacerbated the pain of her daughter’s treatment. She insisted that however painful they were, Lucy must maintain a stoic attitude. She explained to Lucy “how disappointed she was that I’d cried even before Dr. Woolf had put the needle into me, that crying was only because of fear, that I shouldn’t be afraid” (78), Lucy adds, “my mother didn’t know how to conquer what I was afraid of, nor could she even begin to tell me how to do it for myself.” A caregiver would try to help Lucy respond quite differently, to be able to articulate her fears. Pain is an evil and pretending it is not there. Fear is not something that needs to be “conquered”; it simply needs to be acknowledged as a normal response to pain and loss. As Lucy’s treatments continued she tried to find on her own, with only a child’s perspective to draw on, ways of coping with the intolerable. One was simple evasion, to make herself ill enough that the treatments would have to be suspended. She went out in a storm at night getting chilled and drenched and hoping it would raise her white blood cell count. She tried drinking dishwashing liquid to feel nauseated, inhaling water to cause pneumonia, and jabbing herself with rusty nails. Apparently Lucy’s sense of self-preservation kept her from doing anything so extreme as to cause permanent injury. Lucy’s family were religious skeptics, but somehow Lucy somehow found herself on a prayer list and was deluged with sentimental tracts and letters. Lucy wanted to become a believer so that God could give her peace and healing, but how? “After all, I was sold, I wanted to have Jesus help me out and make me good and strong and pure . . . —but exactly how was I supposed to do this? . . . In secrecy I sat down in my bedroom on the blue carpet and asked, ‘God, if you exist, prove it to me.’” But of course there was no voice; the carpet didn’t change color; there was no sudden light. “I knew I only half expected an answer. Was my partial belief preventing God from speaking to me? Didn’t I have to fully believe, or did all this simply mean that there was no answer. . . . I couldn’t bear to think I was wrong, that somehow everything I was going through didn’t actually have meaning.” That everything I was going through didn’t actually have meaning—this is a very succinct summation of a common symptom of spiritual distress, as was Lucy’s sense that God was absent or indifferent. Good pastoral care would have reassured Lucy that her pain and fear were real and that her mother’s insistence that she should hide them was the opposite of helpful. It would have helped bring Lucy to awareness that God does not perform magical healing that is conditional on ignoring her doubts, but that despite her doubts and fears, Lucy was not alone, that God was with her in all her suffering and would give her the strength to deal with the painful effects of her treatment. During the period that Lucy was in junior high school the chemo and radiation treatments were successful in eradicating the cancer, but the after effects left her with a mutilated face that was to be her curse for the rest of her life. Other children regarded her as a sort of monster, and the only occasion where she associated normally with other children was Halloween, when she could hide behind a mask. Lucy perceived her mutilated face as transforming her into something that no one could ever love. Trying to bargain with God was one of the devices Lucy adopted to make her suffering bearable. Another, which many of us have attempted to use, was to reflect on how many there are who are enduring worse. After she finished the course of treatment, she had to humiliation of being ridiculed for her facial appearance. How trivial that seemed compared to the atrocities being perpetrated in the world. “My inner life became ever more macabre. Vietnam was still within recent memory and pictures of the horrors of Cambodia loomed on every TV screen and in every newspaper. I told myself again and again how good I had it in comparison. What wonder it was to have food and clothes and no one torturing me. . . . I bombed and starved and persecuted my own suffering right out of existence” (126). What gives a particular piquancy to Autobiography of a Face is the narration. While much of the story is seen from the perspective of a child, when Lucy wrote the memoir she was already in her thirties, an accomplished literary stylist, who offers an especially insightful comment on her youthful attempt to will away her own suffering by reflecting on the greater sufferings of others: “I had the capacity of imagination to momentarily escape my own pain, and I had the elegance of imagination to teach myself something true about the world around me, but I didn’t have the clarity of imagine to grant myself the complicated and necessary right to suffer” (126-27). The mature Lucy beautifully phrased those different powers of her imagination. Capacity of imagination is the ability to escape from the painful present, elegance of imagination is the ability to use what apply what we imagine to our circumstances—that is the quality we use when we imagine ourselves into a character in fiction. It is also what a chaplain draws on to empathize with a patient. But clarity of imagination allows us to compare and contrast, to perceive whether the situation we imagine fits the actual perceptions of the patient. One of the hardest lessons to learn as a chaplain is that the patient’s perception was the reality. In Lucy’s case she had to be her own chaplain and alleviating her suffering by reflecting on the greater sufferings of others simply does not work. When she was in high school Lucy read Hesse’s Siddhartha, and like so many of us in the sixties and seventies, she went through a Buddhist period. Having encountered the noble truth that all suffering is the result of worldly attachment. “Desire and all its painful complications, I decided, was something I could and would be free of” (178). Of course instant enlightenment through popular fiction proved as illusory as Lucy’s previous attempts to alleviate her suffering. Surgery to repair her jaw proved ineffectual. The aftereffects of the radiation treatment prevented skin grafts from being successful; they were simply reabsorbed. In college at Sarah Lawrence and graduate school in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, Lucy finally discovered friends who could love her as well as some literary success. There is a beautiful memoir, Truth and Beauty, by the novelist Anne Patchett, who was Lucy’s housemate in Iowa City, lovingly depicting her friendship with Lucy, a friendship that only ended with Lucy’s death at the age of thirty-nine. Sexually Lucy was very promiscuous, obsessed with having sex to prove to herself that she could attract men, as well as addicted to heroin. Some readers of Ann Patchett’s memoir cannot understand how Anne could have put up with such a manipulative and clingy friend as Lucy. But those of us who have had a relationship, however difficult, with high maintenance high-octane persons like Lucy will understand. By comparison relationships with others just seem dull. As an adult Lucy continued to undergo surgeries and attempted to find treatments, including moving to Scotland, where Lucy’s Irish citizenship made her eligible for the National Health Service. “How could I pass up the possibility that it might work, that at long last I might finally fix my face, fix my life, my soul?” (215). According to Ann Patchett, Lucy underwent thirty-six surgeries. None of which was more than temporarily successful. Surely her surgeons must have been partly to blame for encouraging so many procedures when it must have been obvious that there was little chance that they would be effective. But it was Lucy herself who saw her face as her only “hope” for a life that she could accept. We come away from reading Autobiography of a Facewith the sad insight that by the time she was a teenager Lucy had already focused all her hopes on the wrong object. In spiritual care we distinguish between cure and healing. Lucy was obsessed with a cure, with “fixing” her face so that she could become an object of love, and then her real life would finally begin. But for her to be healed would have meant that being able to accept that she already was loved and was worthy the love of her friends, and of herself. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 2012
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Aug 10, 2014
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Paperback
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| 0241003504
| 9780241003503
| 0241003504
| 3.72
| 69,319
| Mar 13, 2014
| Jun 05, 2014
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it was amazing
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When you suffer dementia you travel into a strange land from which there is no return. The first signs you’re over the border are more annoying than f
When you suffer dementia you travel into a strange land from which there is no return. The first signs you’re over the border are more annoying than frightening. Someone seems to be hiding your personal effects. Then they’ve rearranged the furniture in your room or redesigned your entire house so that doors won’t open or if they do then alarms go off & people you’ve never met before seem annoyed @ something that you have no recall that you did. Even when they’re standing right in front of you they talk about you as if you weren’t there, or ask you childish questions like what year it is & you can’t remember what the right word is for whatever thing you’re trying to talk about. That’s just starters. If you’ve been a caregiver, either @ an agency or a facility, or @ home as the PCG for someone you love, you’ll find the voice of Maud in Elizabeth Is Missing reminding you of what it is like to look after someone with dementia. When the story begins Maud is only mildly disabled. She is alert & oriented - knows who she is, where she is, & recognises her daughter Helen & her granddaughter Katie. But Maud’s short term memory is absolutely shot to pieces & she cannot remember anything that she does or is told, so that if she tries to boil a kettle for tea she’ll forget all about it & leave it on the stove. Maud is obsessed by the belief that her best friend of many years, Elizabeth, has disappeared from her house & suspects that she may have met with foul play from her son Peter, who seems to continually annoyed @ Maud. Because she cannot remember anything recent, Maud surrounds herself with slips on notepaper inscribed “Elizabeth is missing’, which give the book its title. Because of Emma Healey’s brilliant use of a first person narration, it takes the reader quite a while to distinguish Maud’s version of events from ‘reality’ & understand why Helen, Peter, the police & Maud’s GP all find dealing with Maud so difficult & to find out what has ‘really’ occurred. I put ‘reality’ in scare commas because that is merely what we call it. We have to remember that dementia patients are no longer in our world, & that if we want to be with them, we have to go into their world & sometimes, as in this novel, there are some fascinating glimpses of a lost world, here in 1946. The partitions between past & present often become very thin, as is true for Maud. She is also very much a little girl in postwar Britain & preoccupied with another disappearance, that of her older sister Susan, called Sukey, She is married to Frank, who is what was then termed a ‘wide-boy’ - a petty criminal who deals in black-market ration coupons & stolen military stores. Maud & Sukey’s parents also have a lodger, Douglas, who affects an American accent & is awfully vague about how he spends his spare time. So Emma Healey gives us in Maud a seriously impaired detective describing trying to solve two mysteries almost 70 years apart. Because the first-person narration is instantaneous, Maud can tell us things that two pages later she won’t remember herself. But there is a lot of DIY for us readers in figuring out what’s supposed ‘really’ to have happened. Unreliable narrators fascinate me & this is one of the very best I’ve encountered. I give this book five stars but I realise that I am much too close to the subject of this book, that I feel that Emma Healey really gets it. I’m sure there may be readers who think they’ll find out more about dementia than they ever wanted to know. Of course if you follow the health statistical projections, you’ll see that if you live long enough you surely will find out more about dementia than you ever wanted to know, either as a caregiver or a patient. Elizabeth Is Missing is a good & painless place to start. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 21, 2014
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Jun 24, 2014
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Jun 21, 2014
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 4.16
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it was ok
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Apr 10, 2017
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Mar 17, 2017
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| 3.70
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really liked it
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Mar 28, 2017
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Feb 26, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.91
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really liked it
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Dec 25, 2016
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Dec 26, 2016
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|||||
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| 4.14
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really liked it
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Sep 16, 2016
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Sep 11, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.34
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it was amazing
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Aug 28, 2016
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Aug 10, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.37
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it was ok
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Jan 10, 2016
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Jan 06, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.71
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really liked it
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Dec 21, 2015
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Dec 17, 2015
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|||||
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| 4.28
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really liked it
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Oct 30, 2015
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Oct 01, 2015
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|||||
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| 3.74
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it was amazing
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Oct 11, 2015
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Sep 30, 2015
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|||||
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| 3.90
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liked it
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Aug 04, 2015
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Jul 25, 2015
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|||||
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| 4.10
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really liked it
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Aug 13, 2015
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Apr 27, 2015
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|||||
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| 3.95
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really liked it
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Mar 29, 2015
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Mar 21, 2015
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|||||
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| 4.22
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it was amazing
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Mar 14, 2015
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Feb 09, 2015
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|||||
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| 3.61
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it was amazing
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Jul 10, 2014
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Aug 24, 2014
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|||||
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| 3.87
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really liked it
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Aug 26, 2014
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Aug 22, 2014
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|||||
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| 4.04
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Sep 04, 2014
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Aug 18, 2014
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||||||
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| 4.26
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it was amazing
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not set
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Aug 11, 2014
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|||||
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| 3.99
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it was amazing
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not set
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Aug 11, 2014
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|||||
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| 3.97
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it was amazing
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Apr 2012
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Aug 10, 2014
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|||||
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| 3.72
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it was amazing
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Jun 24, 2014
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Jun 21, 2014
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