Welcome to the backlog of reviews I’m going to try to start churning out now that I’m back from vacation! Hopefully at least one a day until I’m caught up (and, by then, I’ll have more since I doubt I’ll stop reading any time soon…) First up is All the Bright Places, a YA book which, according to Google, is “The Fault in Our Stars meets Eleanor and Park.” I’m going to disagree on that. I think it wants to be, it tries to be, […]
So much better than the film
When Susanna Kaysen was 18, she went to see a new psychiatrist for a conversation after what appears to have been a suicide attempt. She swallowed a large amount of sleeping pills, then regretted her decision and wandered out into the street to get help. The psychiatrist claimed to have spoken to and evaluated Ms. Kaysen for more than three hours, Ms. Kaysen herself claims the meeting was barely half an hour. The end result was nonetheless that she ended up committed to McLean Hospital, […]
A depressive author and a sparkly model meet at a disco
3.5 stars Ash Winters is a bipolar depressive who once wrote a very clinically acclaimed novel, but now makes a living writing mystery genre fiction, when he´s well enough to do anything at all, that is. He feels like a constant disappointment to his friends and family and cannot remember the last time he felt happy or even content. He´s dragged along to a stag party in Brighton against his better judgement and ends up going home with Darian, an Essex model with a spray […]
A story of family dysfunction and the impact of loss
A painful story of a dysfunctional family plagued by mental illness, Housekeeping is nonetheless beautifully written and highly evocative. Two young sisters Ruth and Lucille are left alone when their unmoored mother dumps them at their grandmother’s house at a tender age, and then proceeds to drive herself off a cliff and into a lake, the same lake that her own father—a dreamy, frustrated, and regret-filled man–had died in following a train wreck years earlier. Their aged Nona is a loving and gentle caregiver, but […]
How to Survive the Unsurvivable
Reading The Shock of the Fall took me back to my early teens a little bit. Because back then, before wizard, vampires, and dystopian societies had exploded the YA market, the age-appropriate books found in my local library fell mostly into two categories: the ones with horses and the ones with problems. Sometimes the categories overlapped of course, so you’d get books with horses and problems. For a few years, after picture books and Nancy Drew, but before my brief Serious Adult Classics Only phase […]
Or, The Shock of the Fall
‘I’ll tell you what happened because it will be a good way to introduce my brother. His name’s Simon. I think you’re going to like him. I really do. But in a couple of pages he’ll be dead. And he was never the same after that.’ Published in the USA as “Where The Moon Isn’t”, I have no idea why. Nathan Filer won the Costa Book of the Year award last year for this intensely well crafted debut novel, and now I have read it, […]
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