A Literary Life

Only in America. This well-written and emotional book could only take place in America, where our lack of a defining culture has become our culture. Where we simultaneous see ourselves as “less than” older, wiser European countries and “better than” anyone else because of our flexible, dynamic youth. Frank and Amber, the novel’s main characters, are post-World War II products of that country, self-consciously part of the “greatest generation,” knowing they are destined for wonderful things yet finding themselves in a tract suburban home with two kids and dreams deferred. What follows is a two-pronged journey of self-discovery. One: That they are special enough to break out, to break the mold they see suffocating their individuality. Two: That despite their egos, they are perhaps more like the fallible and oh-so-boring-and-ordinary people around them than they would ever have guessed.

The beginning is slow, but stick with it. There are a lot of scenes sitting around a room over drinks philosophizing, and Frank definitely loves the sound of his own voice.

“This whole country’s rotten with sentimentality,” Frank said one night, turning ponderously from the window to walk the carpet. “It’s been spreading like a disease for years, for generations, until now everything you touch is flabby with it.”

“Exactly,” she said, enraptured by him.

“I mean isn’t that what’s really the matter, when you get right down to it? I mean even more than the profit motive or the loss of spiritual values or the fear of the bomb or any of those things? Or maybe it’s the result of those those things; maybe it’s what happens when all those things start working at once without any real cultural tradition to absorb them. Anyway, whatever it’s the result of, it’s what’s killing the United States. I mean isn’t it? This steady, insistent vulgarizing of every idea and every emotion into some kind of pre-digested intellectual baby food; this optimistic, smiling-though easy-way-out sentimentality in everybody’s view of life?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

“And I mean is it any wonder all the men end up emasculated? Because that is what happens; that is what’s reflected in all this bleating about ‘adjustment’ and ’security’ and ‘togetherness’ — and I mean Christ, you see it everywhere: all this television crap where every joke is built on the premise that daddy’s an idiot and mother’s always on to him; and these loathsome little signs people put up in their front yards — you ever notice those signs up on the Hill?”

“The ‘The’ signs, you mean; with people’s name in the plural? Like ‘The Donaldsons’?”

“Right!” He turned and smiled down at her in triumphant congratulation for having seen exactly what he meant. “Never ‘Donaldson’ or “John D. Donaldson’ or whatever the hell his name is. Always ‘The Donaldsons.’ You picture the whole cozy little bunch of them sitting around all snug as bunnies in their pajamas, for God’s sake, toasting marshmallows. I guess the Campbells haven’t put up a sign like that yet, but give ‘em time. THe rate they’re going now, they will.” He paused here for a deep-throated laugh. “And my God, when you think how close we came to settling into that kind of an existence.”

“But we didn’t,” she told him. “That’s the important thing.”

Wow. The ego is mind-blowing, and the sexism there more than a little apparent. Well, part of that is certainly the time period. I’d love to discuss that element of the book with someone else — whether the author’s goal is to speak to society’s and his wife’s emasculation of Frank as the source of his troubles, or perhaps that his ego and fear of emasculation is what blinds him to his real troubles. Veddy veddy interesting, IMO.

No matter what the author’s intent — in the end, it doesn’t really matter — this books is one that gets the gears turning. It sums up the frustration of the American dream so precisely and deeply, making you both love and hate it’s characters, making you cringe at their pain while you kind of root for their downfall. Yates succeeded in depicting my ambiguous feelings about this country of mine with simple but evokative prose and characters that will whisper in my ear for some time to come. Brilliant.

What ever happened to Yates, who was apparently quite popular in his time? I may have to pick up another of his novels.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

I’m getting way behind on my book reviews — four novels piled up finished, waiting for my final thoughts — and it’s not just that I’m busy. It’s this book, The Broom of the System, that’s holding me back in part. Why? Because I’m not quite sure I’ll explain it right, to do it justice. Because it’s a ME book, one that suits my taste in literature and even my sense of humor perfectly, one of those books that you can almost hear being read aloud in your head and the voice is your friend, someone that completely understands you.

I’m going to note right now that this is me, and a lot of readers — I’ve heard — think David Foster Wallace is overly intellectual, incredibly dense and even unreadable. So be it for those readers. But if the worlds that Wallace creates were real, as real as they feel to me, it’s a place I would certainly visit, fit right in. Those other readers just don’t have to come.

Case in point, let’s talk about Weight Watchers. Picture a very large fat man sitting at a restaurant table explaining why he’s trying to get even fatter in an attempt to swell to the size of the universe, not an atom to spare. Watch your fingers, he’s hungry!

We each need a full universe. Weight Watchers and their allies would have us systematically decrease the Self-component of the universe, so that the great Other-set will be physically attracted to the now more physically attractive Self, and rush in to fill the void caused by that diminution of Self.

Yes, you can read it twice. There’s no shame in that.

Oh the fat man? He’s joined by a colorful cast of weirdos and nutcases. A woman whose body temperature won’t regulate itself, so has to be in a room that’s 98 degrees. Patients strapped in chairs that move along an electronic track at a psychiatrist’s office. A talking, cursing parrot. A one-legged druggie who keeps his stash in his prosthetic. There’s a manmade black-sand desert in the Midwest. A group of escaped senior citizens may or may not be trying to take down a baby food company. You get the point. This is crazy stuff. And crazy stuff brilliantly written.

For instance, character Rick Vigorous describes an emotional (Lolita-esque) memory of riding in the car with his neighbor’s teenage daughter, who he has a little crush on.

In the passenger window beside her were reflected at an angle the images of the oncoming cars and trucks, and there was her image, there, too, waiting; and the cars and trucks bore down in the window and emptied head-on into her reflection, were swallowed and exploded, and out the back of her reflection into my sleepy face came fragments of lights, the street made pale, and a wash of scent.

Yes the scent really came off her head, not off images exploding into light in glass; I am not a complete shitty fool.

Ha! You see that, what he did there? Went off on a flight of fancy and then cut it back to earth. I hope I’m not the only one who has read this book that laughed.

Obviously, I think this is a fantastic book and I loved pretty much every minute, feeling a little sad when I reached the end. But just like his more famous novel Infinite Jest, it’s one I’ll treasure for a long time. Jest is probably better in the big scheme of things, but Broom is shorter and less menacing for certain for readers who’ve never attempted Wallace.

Believe me, from the bottom of my heart which beats faster for this man, David Foster Wallace was an amazingly gifted author with a unique, agile and playful mind. I won’t go further into his death, because it truly saddens me, except to say that even if he’s gone, I’m glad he existed. When someone reaches that far inside your head and seems to truly understand you, perhaps even to share a lot of your major personality traits, it’s a really moving experience.

Sniff. Blub. Seriously. I love him this much.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

My lovely friend Pam quoted an excerpt from this book on her blog that immediately hooked my interest and then was kind enough to lend me her (hardcover) copy, despite my history of dropping books in hot tubs. And I am incredibly grateful: for her recommendation, for this delicious prose, for Saramago’s talent and for the elation I always experience when I read a 5-out-of-5-star book, which hasn’t happened since the last time I read a Pam recommendation.

Like most kids, I used to wonder what it would be like to be blind. I’d close my eyes and see if I could make it to the kitchen, to the bus stop, just by counting steps. Losing my sight, that plunge into emptiness and infantile helplessness, is the scariest of all disabilities for a book-junky like myself. But never did I take the fantasy as far as to imagine that the blindness could be contagious, that when everyone has gone blind, there are no good samaritans to help you across the street or to teach you braille, no one left to reorient you to the world, no one with the eyes to look into a microscope and find a cure. In this novel, Saramago takes that blind world to its inevitable destination: a world where other people don’t really exist unless you bump into them, where names no longer matter and homes are forever lost, where shame for your actions is a thing of the past and inhibitions fly out the window. In this dark world, it’s difficult if not impossible to perform the most basic human functions of eating, cleaning onself and even shitting — get used to the word, readers, because you’re in for a heap of shit here.

Through the eyes of the doctor’s wife, the one unfortunate person who keeps her vision in the novel, we have this pure helplessness and chaos thrust upon us. The rape and murder, the theft and betrayal, the starvation. But mostly the filth, of unwashed bodies and excrement-slick city streets and rotting corpses and putrid food. While she’s not the narrator of the story, the doctor’s wife leads the reader along much like her husband and the other blind people in her care, taking us by the hand and guiding us through this vile and primitive place that was once a civilization.

It is this feeling of being guided and herded, just like those afflicted with the white blindness, that leads me to shout out, “DON’T go see this movie.” Boycott it now and pretend it was never made, folks, because there is no way in hell or Hollywood that the frightening, feral world of this Nobel Prize-winning novel can be reproduced visually. I’ve never before perceived that as readers, we are essentially blind. It is only through other’s words — through the artform of storytelling — that people, places and situations are painted in our minds. But Saramago obviously grasped this concept of the reader as sightless, and he uses the idea like a sharp weapon to make the book a searing experience. And with odd formatting — little puncuation, fewer paragraph breaks and no quote marks — he furthers that feeling of unfamiliarity, of strange newness and disorientation. Staring at a white page dotted with words really does feel like the white blindness, the doctor’s wife our only point of reference and we hang on tight for fear of becoming lost. How, tell me, could this feeling of blind terror of words on paper ever, ever be reproduced on the big screen?

[W]e went down all the steps of indignity, all of them, until we reached total degradation, the same might happen here albeit in a different way, then we still had the excuse that the degradation belonged to someone else, not now, now we are all equal regarding good and evil, please, don’t ask me what good and what evil are, we knew what it was each time we had to act when blindness was an exception, what is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with the others, not that which we have with ourselves, one should not trust the latter, forgive this moralizing speech, you do not know, you cannot know, what it means to have eyes in a world in which everyone else is blind, I am not a queen, no, I am simply the one who was born to see this horror, you can feel it, I both feel and see it and that’s enough of this dissertation, Let’s go and eat. No one asked any questions, the doctor simply said, If I ever regain my sight, I shall look carefully at the eyes of others, as if I were looking into their souls, Their souls, asked the old man with the eyepatch, Or their minds, the name does not matter, is was then that, surprisingly, if we consider that we are dealing with a person without much education, that the girl with the dark glasses said, Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.

I know, I know. I’m a maudlin reader, forever falling in love with books about difficult subjects. And I’m also a literature snob, reveling in complex and unique writers, all dense sentences and poetic license. So of course this book is right up my alley. But all that aside, I can’t imagine anyone taking this literary journey and not being shocked at the new human experience Saramago plucked from his imagination and made real. Hip-deep in this book, you can not help but be amazed — as I constantly am — at the power and the art of words on a page.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

As most people who have talked to me about books in the last year know, I love The Road. I’ve often said so with a sigh in my voice and a twinkle in my eye, because despite the seriousness of the subject matter, I fell in love. That novel made me feel as if I was discovering something for the first time: a talent, a voice, a world, an ever-present human story only now articulated.

But I’m self-aggrandizing, I know. The sharp, artful voice and aching melancholy of Cormac McCarthy has been there since he set pen to page, continued to be there as he won the National Book Award and wasn’t discovered when MY eyes met his words. All the Pretty Horses, written in 1992, proves that. However, I can’t help but feel again that I have stumbled upon something momentous, something meant just for me in a small way, something beautiful that will make my eyes twinkle and my voice sigh when I try to convey just how remarkable an accomplishment All the Pretty Horses is.

But McCarthy describes that startling feeling of discovery better than me in his stark, biting dialog.

“I never knowed there was such a place as this.
I guess there’s probably every kind of place you can think of.
Rawlins nodded. I wouldn’t have thought of this one, he said.”

In this case, the two main characters — teenagers from Texas ranches who travel into Mexico looking for work as cowboys — have found a level of pain and misery and degradation previously unimaginable. Their coming-of-age trek has been blown off course by the harsh desert wind, slapped about by the hand of fate, which knocks out of them the idea that they’re entitled success, happiness, even life. It all begins with a chance meeting with a younger stranger who claims his name is Blevins, and that one chance snowballs through love, talent, destiny, friendship, hope and crushing loss until we wind up in a place that’s brutal and bloody yet truthful.

And somehow beautiful:

“He picked out the smallest doe among them and shot her … The sky was dark and a cold wind ran through the bajada and in the dying light a cold blue cast had turned the doe’s eyes to but one thing more of the things she lay among in the darkening landscape. Grass and blood. Blood and stone. Stone and dark medallions that the first flat drops of rain caused upon them. He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he’d first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he’d presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”

Only McCarthy could explain to me this masculine strength and honor and adventure so deftly, me! Who usually shies away from Westerns and is allergic to horses. Even I can see how the stark lines (and again, stark prose) of the landscape and of these characters’ lives are somehow more telling, more primal than every flowery, curl-i-que tale. The latter rely on embellishment and literary trickery to establish depth. Whereas the pure, beautiful depth of McCarthy’s work aches in your bones and raises goosebumps on your skin.

I’m afraid to say there’s going to be lots more Cormac McCarthy on my plate and on my bookshelves in the future. Anyone know which one I should tackle next?

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

It’s been a while since I liked a book this much, since a book actually made me feel as if I were discovering something never before touched by my eyes, a style never conceived of in my tiny little brain. It’s obvious when I really like a book from the beginning solely because I talk about it often — and in some detail — with my non-reader fiance, who listens attentively but will probably never pick up the novel I’m extolling. (I’m just being honest here, Love. I know you have your best intentions.) But I would probably talk about this book to anyone with earshot when I have it in my hands, about how irreverent yet honest the story is, how deep it digs into Dominican-American culture, how funny, how true to life, how simultaneously down to earth and moving.

It is the story — duh — of Oscar Wao, the first-generation son of a single mother from the Dominican Republic. While the Dominicans (especially the men) have a reputation for masculine prowess and womanizing (I don’t know Spanish that well, but the book must have at least six Spanish words for pussy vagina), Oscar is instead an overweight and over-vocabularied nerd of the highest degree. Sci Fi and fantasy novels, comic books, anime: You name it, Oscar loves it, and the narrator inserts these great nerd references whenever humanly possible. Check out the geek speak when describing the binding thread of the Oscar’s family’s story, a supposed curse or fuku placed on Oscar’s grandfather but common in many Dominican stories:

“It’s important to remember that fuku doesn’t always strike like lightning. Sometimes it works patiently, drowning a nigger by degrees, like with the Admiral or the U.S. in paddies outside Saigon. Sometimes it’s slow and sometimes it’s fast. It’s doomish in that way, makes it harder to put a finger on, to brace yourself against. But be assured: like Darkseid’s Omega Effect, the Morgoth’s bane, no matter how many turns and digressions this shit might take, it always — and I mean always — gets its man. “

Yes, this book won the Pulitzer Prize. And yes, it cusses like this on almost every page. And hell yes, I love what the world of literature is coming to. (No sarcasm here. I promise.) Diaz can be simultaneous crass and erudite. While cussing can often be juvenile, Diaz uses it like a cultural weapon and proves he’s doing it deftly, purposefully. The below, for instance, is a description of Oscar’s mother as a girl:

“I mean, what straight middle-aged brother had not attempted to regenerate himself through the alchemy of young pussy. And if what she often said to her daughter was true, Beli had some of the finest pussy around. The sexy isthmus of her waist alone could have launched a thousand yolas.”

An allusion to Helen of Troy and the word pussy on the same page? With vocab biggies like isthmus and alchemy? Wow, or rather Wao.

And while Oscar may be a lumbering, pitiful and heart-rendingly sweet geek, he’s still a Dominican, passionately interested in women, who thinks girls “were the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, the DC and the Marvel. Homes had it bad.”

I loved joining Oscar on his quest for romance, in his depths of self pity and despair. I loved watching the present and the past of the story unfold, seeing the patterns but being left wanting more, wondering, my mind tripping back over the story to make connections. But perhaps above all, I loved this witty, bantering voice Diaz masters in the narrator. He’s part David Foster Wallace with his footnotes and educated allusions, and he’s part street-level shit talking at its finest, silver tongued and savvy. It’s simply excellent prose, even if you get a little confused at the Spanish sections — don’t worry, everything absolutely vital is translated. Much like Oscar’s life, the novel was wondrous, taking the nitty-gritty everyday and sprinkling some magic dust and cuss words to take it to the next level of meaning.

Can I put this on our wedding registry? Anyone?

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

Meet two-egg (fraternal) twins Estha and Rahel, two kids growing up in the India state of Kerala in the turbulent 1960s. Welcome to the imaginative, confusing, flowing world of two connected siblings, who see the world through each others’ (vibrantly, innocently descriptive) eyes, yet understand only shallowly the events unfolding around around them. Join them as they discover — over the course of childhood and with the distance of adulthood — “the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.”

This Booker Prize-winning novel definitely deserved its accolades. Though it took me much, much longer than normal to get through the book (my fault, not the novel’s), I loved every little description, every meaningful encounter, every private thought. Though the story ostensibly revolves around a tragedy of youth where a young relative visiting from England dies, the tale encompasses so much more and paints a thoughtful portrait of India during that time period.

Communism and unions and the division of wealth are seen in the family’s ownership of Paradise Pickles and Preserves. Gender roles appear in the “men’s needs door” allowed in the uncles bedroom, contrasted against his sister who left her drunken husband, who is considered immoral. Westernization: Is everything foreign more valuable than what comes out of India, including people?

But yet, the overwhelming theme is loss, tragedy and guilt. Not an uncommon theme, I admit. But the talent of Roy, her offbeat yet poignant descriptive ability, brings the theme to a higher level. Take, for instance, her description of Estha, who retreats into silence in reaction to his cousin’s death:

Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It send its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, emtombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it.

I absolutely love the irreverence of Roy’s language. Random capitalization. Repetition. Her unique titling of people and things: Estha becomes Ambassador Pelvis with his special-occasion puff; Rahel is labeled a fountain in a Love in Tokyo due to her hairstyle. Roy reaches into the brain to pull out descriptions I would never have dreamed of, but that immediately bring images to mind. For example, the twins’ mother’s appearance is gauged in toothbrushes. As she stares in the mirror, she thinks she could definitely hold one under the fold of her bottom — several even — but her smaller breasts couldn’t support one.

And unlike heavier works by just-as-gifted authors, the words alone are not the only joy of the novel. The story itself will make you ache, both in its occasional sweetness and innocence as well as its tragedy. The guilt, whether deserved or not — in this world, tragedy almost seems inevitable — is palpable. But sometimes the best of books make you feel the worst, right? And despite it being the author’s first novel, this is definitely one of the best.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

Let me come out and say it: This book was one of the most inspired, well crafted and brilliant books I’ve read in a while, perhaps since The Road. Easy to read and straight-forwardly told, this story of Stevens — the last of a generation of English butlers with dignity and gravitas — surprised me with its humor and depth.

Every thread, every thought is woven together so gracefully. There was a moment at the kitchen table when I read the last page where the art of the novel hit me full force, making me see how this narrator’s personality and world view effected not only way we are told the tale, but the tragedies and triumphs of the plot beneath. In a way, Stevens is the ultimate unreliable narrator: Without artifice or intentional deception, we nonetheless see that his story is not the WHOLE story. While he spends time documenting the philosophy of his profession and his absolute dedication to it (the persona is a suit one never removes except when utterly alone, he notes), the reader sees what the unperceptive, dutiful butler doesn’t: what is really happening in the world, who the people around him truly are, their emotions, their desires.

Take, for instance, Steven’s experience on the road trip the novel centers around. Having rarely traveled far from his employer’s estate and never for simple pleasure, he observes the “greatness” of the scenery in such a unique way, what becomes a very signature way of the character.

“And yet what precisely is this ‘greatness’? Just where, or in what, does it lie? I am quite aware it would take a far wiser head than mine to answer such a question, but if I were forced to hazard a guess, I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of the beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of it own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it. In comparison, the sorts of sights offered in such places as Africa and American, though undoubtedly very exciting, would, I am sure, strike the objective viewer as inferior on account of their unseemly demonstrativeness.”

Demonstrative scenery? I say! Another great instance is how, because of the jovial character of his new American employer Mr. Farraday, Stevens attempts to master the art of making witty retorts, something too casual and unplanned to be easy for him.

A certain incident “is as good an illustration as any of the hazards of uttering witticisms. By the very nature of a witticism, one is given very little time to assess its various possible repercussions before one is called to give voice to it, and one gravely risks uttering all manner of unsuitable things if one has not first acquired the necessary skill and experience. There is no reason to suppose this is not an area in which I will become proficient given time and practice, but, such are the dangers, I have decided it best, for the time being at least, not to attempt to discharge this duty in respect to Mr. Farraday until I have practiced further.”

The personality of Stevens is so alive and real, despite the obvious typecasting as “the butler,” partially because he doesn’t see himself as a type. Where he is blind, we can see and we can ask. Has he really reached the peak of his profession? Has he really become the ultimate butler he so lovingly describes? Or has his whole life been subsumed within this duty? Is his success actually a failure? Can we not love this character wholly and completely anyway, even as we ache for him?

As I said, the poignancy of this device hit me hard on the last page, at which point I burst into satisfied tears, confounding The Boyfriend. “I thought you really liked the book,” he said. “Oh yes,” I sniffed and blew unattractively into a tissue, relishing the emotion the book released.

Ishiguro, like a star athlete, makes perfection seem so simple. A good author can take a pile of letters, a collection of words, a string of sentences, and create with these simple tools a unique and solid experience, something as real to a reader as a friend, a memory or a souvenir of an eventful vacation. Though I’m a library rat, this is one book I will consider buying, just so the sight of it on the shelf can renew that flood of emotion and amazement this talented author created in me. Just so the joy — and pain — will never leave me.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

I love a challenge, and obviously so does Joshua Ferris, who wrote this entire novel from the “we” point of view. An argument for brilliance in and of itself if it’s pulled off well. Add to that “we,” however, the perfect environment for a cohesive perspective: an office of people, specifically an advertising firm battling the post-dot-com economic slump with the weapons of lay offs and cut backs.

“Some days felt longer than other days. Some days felt like two whole days. Unfortunately those days were never the weekends. Our Saturdays and Sundays passed in the half the time of a normal workday. In other words, some weeks felt like we worked ten straight days and hand one one day off. We could hardly complain. Time was being added to our lives. But then it wasn’t easy to rejoice, exactly, realizing that time just wasn’t moving fat enough. We had any number of clocks surrounding us, and every one of them at one time or another exhibited a lively sense of humor. We found ourselves wanting to hurry tiem along, which was not in the long run good for our health. Everybody was trapped in this contradiction but nobody every dared articulate it. They just said, ‘Can you believe it’s only three-fifteen?’”

In addition to these darkly comic moments of perfectly understandable gloom, the book tackles the irresistibility of office gossip as well as it’s Schadenfreude (Jeez, I’ve always wanted to use that word!), our love/hate relationship with our jobs (we hate them until we have a chance of losing them) and how we spend more than 8 hours a day with people we will never really know. Yep, all those things and cancer, sexual trysts, office supply theft, antidepressants, mediocrity and success – or “so-called” success.

Is the book perfect? No. The “we” gets a little hard to carry at some points, and there are perhaps a few more pages that there needs to be to accomplish the same result. But I really, really liked this unique and experimental book. So much so that I now owe the local library $1.80 because I didn’t want to turn it in until I wrote this review (and I’m currently about 6 books behind on reviews. Freelance work is great, but drains your free time for sure). I hope to see more great books from this first time novelist.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hard cover