Posted on by saraelizabeth419 · 1 Comment

S J Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep

“My life…is built on quicksand. It shifts from one day to the next. Things I think I know are wrong, things I am certain of, facts about my life, myself, belong to years ago. All the history I have reads like fiction…they exist, but as shadows in the dark. As strangers, they crisscross my life, connecting, disconnecting. Elusive, ethereal. Like ghosts.”

How would you feel if every time you woke, your mind erased itself? You have no idea where you are or who’s sleeping next to you. You go to the bathroom and see pictures taped up to the wall and mirror, pictures of you with this other person, smiling and aging. It’s only then that you glance into the mirror and gasp because your appearance has changed so much that you almost don’t recognize yourself…until you look into your eyes and realize that it’s you. How would you feel?

For Christine, in S.J. Watson’s debut novel, Before I Go to Sleep, this is precisely the case. Suffering from a rare form of amnesia, she can retain memories in the span of a day, but once she goes to sleep they are lost and the next morning she has to go through the process of learning them all over again. Her memories are not completely gone though; sometimes they come back to her, and she writes them down. With the clock constantly running out, will Christine be able to reclaim her memories and her life for good, or will they forever be lost in the abyss of her mind?

In truly brilliant prose, Watson brings the reader into Christine’s mind as memories flood back to her and she tries to put the missing pieces of her life together in hopes of remembering what caused her amnesia in the first place. It makes you realize just how lonely and frustrating it would be to wake up every morning, day in and day out, and never know who you are, and despite those painful memories that you would wish you could forget, it is those memories that help define us, help make us who we are today, and without them, we would be lost, just like Christine.

20140428-101623.jpg

Posted on by saraelizabeth419

Amy Hatvany’s Safe With Me

In Amy Hatvany’s new novel, Safe With Me, published in March by Washington Square Press, she weaves a tale of abuse, loss and unconditional love through three distinct alternating narrations of two women and one teenager, who are connected long before they meet.

It had been nearly a year since Hannah Scott lost her daughter as she was biking out of their driveway and hit by a car. Since then, she threw herself into her work, opening up a second hair salon and moving into an apartment above it, trying to pick up the pieces when all the while she’s still devastated by it. It’s not until a new friend walks into her life (and her salon) with a connection to her daughter that she is finally able to face the situation and start healing.

Olivia Bell has lived her life in fear for a long time, fearful of her husband’s sometimes abusive tendencies, and fearful of her daughter Maddie’s struggling health, which, after an organ transplant a year earlier is finally improving enough that she can return to school. It is when Olivia picks Maddie up on her first day back in tears that she decides to make her daughter feel better…by taking her to the grand opening of a new hair salon in town. Little do they know that their trip to Hannah’s salon will change their lives forever.

At the heart of this novel lies the concept of the power of emotions and how strongly they can affect us, sometimes without us even knowing it. Hatvany makes us take a look at our own lives and relationships, past the ideals, past the rose-colored glasses, and allows us to see them for what they really are (were).

“We try on personalities like second skins, learning to present only the best versions of ourselves to the world, fearful of what might happen if we reveal just how imperfect and vulnerable we really are. But it’s these imperfections…these struggles, that truly connect us.”

Posted on by saraelizabeth419 · 2 Comments

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful & Damned

First published by Scribner in 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned is a story about love, hope and dreams, and what happens when relationships unravel, hope fades, and dreams come true only after you’ve hit your breaking point and therefore can no longer appreciate them. Thought to be based in part on Fitzgerald’s life with Zelda, the novel follows the lives of Anthony Patch and his wife, the beautiful Gloria Gilbert – socialites that inevitably fall from grace because they’re too focused on seeking out the pleasures of life without any of the responsibilities.

In a book review for the New York Times by Louise Maunsell Field in 1922, she writes that, “its slow-moving narrative is the record of lives utterly worthless utterly futile. Not one of the book’s main characters…ever rises to the level of decent humanity.” In many ways, Field was not wrong. When we first meet the novel’s main protagonist, Anthony Patch, he is self-absorbed and living in a small apartment with a servant who comes in in the morning to clean and make Anthony breakfast. He has no profession, choosing to avoid the work-force altogether, but lives under the façade that he is trying to write the next American novel. He spends much of his time socializing with friends and women, accepting an allowance from his grandfather, the wealthy Adam Patch, while waiting for him to die so that he can inherit his fortune.

Anthony’s life doesn’t change that much after he meets and marries Gloria Gilbert because Gloria is the same way as him, wanting to spend her life as leisurely and full of excitement as possible. Much of the novel’s focus is on the parties that Gloria and Anthony host at their apartment in the city and “little gray house” upstate. These parties comprised of endless streams of people drinking excessively for days at a time. We watch Gloria and Anthony go deeper and deeper into debt, selling off bonds like water and downsizing places of residence numerous times. When Adam Patch dies and they learn that they were left with nothing in the will, a length legal battle ensures, but it is not until Anthony is dragged to the brink of insanity that there is a resolution. Their life of leisure and wealth resumes, but it does so at the cost of everything else.

In a way, The Beautiful and Damned can be looked at as a tale of morality. How, having all the money in the world doesn’t matter if you lose your own soul to get it, and how a life of leisure doesn’t necessarily bring about happiness or excitement. What really matters in life is the quality of it and the people who you choose to surround yourself with…a lesson that Gloria and Anthony never learned. This may not have been Fitzgerald’s most exciting book (it was a bit mundane), but his brilliant writing is there.

“After a few tastes of this latter dish I had had enough. Here! I said, Experience is not worth the getting. It’s not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you – it’s a wall that an active you runs up against. So I wrapped myself in what I thought was my invulnerable skepticism and decided that my education was complete. But it was too late. Protect myself as I might by making no new ties with tragic and predestined humanity, I was lost with the rest. I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

Posted on by saraelizabeth419

How I Met Your Mother – Last Forever

This morning, after a jaw-dropping/breath-stopping/tear-inducing series finale of one of my favorite shows, I awoke with the same mixed feelings as I had gone to bed with. Did they really just end HIMYM like that? Is that all we get? Part of me likes the way the series ended, after all, Ted does end up with the love of his life, and isn’t that what the story was all about? But there’s another part of me that feels cheated by the whole thing. With the exception of Marshall’s becoming a judge, everything that I thought I knew about the show, everything that I was made to believe about its characters, turned out to anything other than what I had expected. Okay, maybe that was a slight exaggeration on my part, but only a slight one.

For me, there were three major shocks ( disappointments?) and a bunch of little ones, the first major one being that Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and Robin (Cobie Smulders) end up divorcing after three years of marriage. We all knew that Robin would eventually become a big-time reporter, and for the past few seasons we all knew that Barney and Robin were going to get married (this last season was devoted completely to it!), but from the way the story had been going it seemed like Robin was the only woman who could make Barney want to be a better man. In his wedding vows, he promised never to lie to her – knowing Barney’s character that could have been the most important thing that he ever said on the show…until he ended up slipping back into his old womanizing ways (post-divorce), having a “perfect month,” and becoming a father. Yes, Barney becomes a father, and it takes the first time that he holds his daughter for him to really commit to someone. Looking back, one would never have thought that his is how Barney would have ended up, but he did always secretly love babies, and he slept with enough women to make you think why hasn’t this happened yet, so I guess it wasn’t that far-fetched. Robin, on the other hand, distances herself from the gang, missing important milestones, and throws herself into her work. I was team Robin and Barney all the way, so for their story to end this way makes me a little sad, but, as I said before, it was one of three shocks for me.

The second major shock – and perhaps the most controversial – is that the mother dies. She dies. In fact, from the very first time that we see future Ted (Josh Radner) sit his children down to tell them the story of how he met their mother, she was already dead. For. Six. Years. That’s right. We see little glimpses of their life together, finding out that, even though Ted does propose to the mother (Christin Milioti), it takes seven years and two kids before they walk down the aisle. They really are perfect together, right down to their meeting under that yellow umbrella at the Far Hampton train station – the one that we had all been waiting nine years to witness, and it was every bit as amazing as I thought it would be…but she dies. As soon as I saw the scene with her in a hospital bed, and future Ted talking about her illness (we never find out what exactly was wrong with her), I knew that she was not the one that Ted ends up with. This is where the part of me that feels cheated comes in, because the whole series is about Ted’s journey to find the perfect woman, the mother of his children, the person he will grow old with. We waited so long to see it happen – knowing that it would happen – and then it does, but in the blink of an eye it’s gone, and that kinda broke my heart a little bit.

The third major shock is that Ted and Robin end up together. In the final moments of the show, Ted shows up at Robin’s place with the blue French horn (its back!), and while I wasn’t too keen on the Ted and Robin storyline (I am team Robin and Barney), I did love the idea of bringing the blue French horn back – it was a fitting way for them to get back together. We all know that throughout the series, Ted has struggled on-and-off with his feelings for Robin, but she didn’t always feel the same way back, so it was never in my head that they would end up together and felt a little like a cop-out, especially since the writers had known that this was going to be the outcome all along.

I think Emil Yahr said it best. In her blog for the Washington Post in regards to the HIMYM finale, she writes that “it’s not really about the destination, it’s the journey to get there.” And perhaps she is right. This was not the long awaited ending that fans were looking for, but maybe it could in fact be the best one after all.

Final thought, I really like the title of the episode, “Last Forever.” I could write an entire blog on it, because really, it could be applied to each of the characters individually, but in the matter of Ted, Robin did turn out to be his “last forever.”

20140401-142423.jpg

Posted on by saraelizabeth419

Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why (YA)

If you’re looking for a novel that will grip you in a new way, then you should pick up Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher.  Published in 2007, the novel tells the story of Hannah Baker, only, she’s not your ordinary main character because Hannah Baker is already dead, having committed suicide a few weeks before the novel takes place.  Even though Hannah is technically dead, she is very much alive throughout the novel, by way of cassette tapes that she recorded prior to committing suicide.  Those tapes, containing the thirteen reasons why she chose to kill herself are mailed to students from her school – ones that each make up a reason.  The other main character is Clay Jensen.  The story takes place entirely in one night, while Clay listens to the tapes and relives the events with Hannah, some that he had known about, but most that he had not, while desperately trying to figure out where he fits in, and who already knows about him.

Although many of Hannah’s reasons seem to be minute and not reason why someone would choose to end their own life, you can feel the events and reasons adding up in her head and you witness her point of no return.  Told in a dual narration between Hannah’s tapes and Clay’s present – his reaction to the tapes and the journey he goes on – it is definitely unique.  Hannah and Clay’s stories are going on simultaneously, and the only way to determine who is narrating is by the typeface: if it’s italic or normal.

This is really a book that any parent, teacher or librarian should read.  Also, any teenager who is having a hard time in school, or is thinking about committing suicide, because I feel like this book can really help save people.  It can help those in pain to realize that their thoughts aren’t normal, and that they need to reach out for help before it is too late.  Teenage suicide is preventable.

Posted on by saraelizabeth419

John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (YA)

In The Fault in Our Stars, John Green tells the story of Hazel Grace Lancaster, a teenager living with a cancer that will eventually kill her, and the boy that she falls in love with, Augustus “Gus” Waters. Hazel lives on oxygen tanks and lung machines, as she has stage 4 thyroid cancer that metastasized in her lungs. For the past few years, she has been taking the experimental drug Phalanxifor, which has been her miracle drug, keeping her alive. Gus also has suffered from cancer, losing a leg and a potential basketball career to osteosarcoma, but he is in remission. They meet at a support group that Hazel’s parents force her to attend; Gus was there supporting a friend of his, Isaac, who was losing his eyes to cancer.

At first, Hazel and Gus are just friends; both exchange their favorite books with each other. Gus’s book is a novelization based on his favorite video game, whereas Hazel’s is, what she feels a literary masterpiece, entitled “An Imperial Affliction” – of which she is obsessed. Gus soon becomes obsessed too, and they eventually embark on a journey to Amsterdam to meet the author himself, but at the same time learning one of life’s hardest lessons.

The premise of this book sounds a bit depressing, and at times it is just that, but it is also inspiring. Despite their circumstances, Hazel and Gus fall in love and support each other through the ups and downs of cancer, and in attempts to fulfill last wishes. It is not a novel for the light-hearted, but it is amazing nonetheless. I leave you with a quote!

“I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can’t make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn’t see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.”

Posted on by saraelizabeth419

Lois Lowry’s The Giver

From the moment I started Lois Lowry’s dystopian novel The Giver, I knew that it would be one of those books that stays with you long after the final pages have been read.  In some ways, the story is timeless – kids riding bicycles and playing in the yard together after school, families sharing meals and talking about their problems – but it’s not long before you realize that things are a bit off (a lot off actually).  And, as you get deeper and deeper, more things come to the surface.  Things that, once learned, can never be un-learned; things that have the power to change not only the lives of the two people who actually understand what is going on, but the lives of everyone in the Community as well.

The Giver tells the story of Jonas, a young boy who lives in a village, referred to as the Community, with his father, mother and sister Lily.  Every afternoon he plays with his friends, among them are Asher and Fiona.  Jonas and his friends are elevens, awaiting twelve, which is a very important age in the Community.  When you become a twelve, your life starts to change.  You are given an assignment of which, after an apprenticeship, will become your job.  The assignments are given out to the new twelves in a yearly ceremony after all the younger children have already been promoted.  That’s the way it works in the Community.  Many of the assignments are odd, which are explained away as being part of the rules (everything is part of the rules).  There are birth mothers – no one has their own children.  Couples apply to the elders for children and, once approved, are given one.  There are the nurturers (Jonas’ father is a nurturer), who take care of the babies (newchildren) until they are ones.  They are then given names (also in the yearly ceremony) and presented to a family unit.  Another assignment is to be a caretaker at the house of the old, where all the people go when they get older, before they are released from the community.

When the ceremony of the twelves takes place, Jonas is skipped.  He becomes increasingly nervous, as does everyone else, who, as we later find out, go out of their way to avoid feeling discomfort (it’s part of the rules).  After the last assignment is given, the chief elder turns her attention onto Jonas, calling him to the stage, explaining that he is the most honored of the new twelves; he hasn’t been assigned, he’s been selected.  He’ll be the new Receiver of Memories, considered to be the highest position.  The current Receiver will now become the Giver, as he is giving his memories to Jonas.

What does the position of Receiver of Memories entail?  It’s not exactly what you think.  Jonas receives memories of the world, memories that go “back and back and back” as far back as can be remembered.  It is through Jonas’ sessions with the Giver that we come to realize just how strict the Community really is, and their policy of Sameness.  The thing that struck me the most (okay, there were two things), was that there was no color.  Under Sameness, color (among many other things) was eliminated.  The Giver is the only one who can see color, and he passes it on to Jonas, who cannot for the life of him fathom why such a thing was taken away from them in the first place.  The other thing that really got to me (and Jonas), in a scene that breaks your heart, is when Jonas finds out the truth about the Release ceremonies.  It’s when he really begins to understand just how destructive the Community is.

The conclusion of The Giver did not leave me with feelings of content.  I was prepared for more of a resolution, but, then I thought about it for a few minutes and realized that it was the best possible ending to the story.  The Giver really is a brilliant, well-written novel, which reminds me a lot of Kazuro Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (btw, I am in love with Ishiguro’s work), which is brilliant as well.  They have many differences, but at their cores, they are quiet similar.  Never Let Me Go is also a dystopian novel, so, maybe I just happened to like those.  I leave you with a quote!
 

“Always in the dream, it seemed as if there was a destination: a something – he could not grasp what – that lay beyond the place where the thickness of snow brought the shed to a stop.  He was left, upon awakening, with the feeling that he wanted, even somehow needed, to reach the something that waited in the distance.  The feeling that it was good.  That it was welcoming.  That it was significant.  But he did not know how to get there.”

Posted on by saraelizabeth419 · 1 Comment

Lauren Weisberger’s Chasing Harry Winston

Although not a favorite among critics, I found Lauren Weisberger’s Chasing Harry Winston to be highly entertaining and fun.  It tells the story of three best friends, Emmy, Adriana and Leigh, who, on the verge of turning thirty create a pact (bet?) to drastically change their lives.  Emmy vows to do away with serial monogamy and play the field a bit.  Adriana decides to mend her boy-hopping ways and settle into a full-fledged relationship.  Leigh chooses not to do anything at first because her life seems perfect, but as the story progresses we see that that may not be the case after all.

The story unfolds as Emmy, who thinks that her longtime boyfriend is about to propose to her, gets dumped, while Leigh’s boyfriend, Russell, proposes unexpectedly.  Emmy is heartbroken because, despite her ex’s cheating ways – something that she overlooked – she was optimistic that they were going to last.  She tries to be happy for Leigh, but she can’t help but feel sad.  Emmy end up taking a job that requires her to do quite a bit of globe-trotting, as a means to get away and stay busy.  I think that her decision to play the field stems from a few things (heartbreak, Leigh’s engagement, etc), but it ultimately turns out to be the best thing she ever does, because it allows her to gain control over her life and date/define relationships on her terms instead of just going along with whatever the guy thinks.  In the end it pays off by giving her the confidence that she had been lacking; the one thing that will get her exactly what she wants.

Confidence is not something that Adriana is in need of; in fact, at times one could say that she may have too much confidence, if there is such a thing.  She lives a carefree, pampered life due to the fact that her parents have a ton of money.  Her decision to settle down – or at least attempt to – partially stems from Emmy’s situation (what better way to encourage your friend to change her lifestyle than by changing your own as well?) and partially because, although she does love her life, I think that she was a bit bored with all of it.  She needed to add a bit of depth.  For her, monogamy was a challenge.  She had no problem getting a guy, the question is, would she keep him?

And then there’s Leigh.  Throughout the novel, Leigh experiences a bit of emotional turmoil.  On paper, her life is perfect.  She’s an editor at a major trade publishing house, and she is engaged to one of the city’s most eligible bachelors, but something is off.  She doesn’t feel the spark that you’re supposed to feel when you’re in love, but Russell is perfect on paper (and to everybody in her life), so she stays with him.  It’s not until Leigh is introduced to Jessie, her new client, and starts traveling to his Hamptons’ home on the weekends to edit his new novel, that she lets these feelings of uncertainty with Russell come to the surface, and starts to explore the idea of not being with him.

Chasing Harry Winston is good for anyone who is in the mood for a really fun, girly read.  I think the parts about Emmy are particularly entertaining, as she is the only character who puts a name on her year of boy-hopping, appropriately called “Tour de Whore” (how awesome is that?!).  The characters of Adriana and Leigh are great too.  All in all, this is a great book that I did not want to put down.  I was able to read it in less than a week.

Posted on by saraelizabeth419

Emily Giffin’s Love the One You’re With

In Emily Giffin’s Love the One You’re With, she explores the idea about what could happen if the one who got away resurfaced.  How would you react to the situation?  Would you let that person back into your life, or would you close yourself off and run in the other direction?  The answer seems like it should be black and white, especially if you’re in a place in your life where you are happy, but for Ellen, it is the hardest decision that she has ever had to make.  It had been almost ten years since she had laid eyes on him, but one fateful night, on a rainy NYC street corner, she runs into Leo and her life as she knows it may never be the same.

Ellen is a freelance photographer, something that she loves, and her husband, Andy, is a lawyer, working for a large firm and hating every minute of it.  Andy’s sister Margot is Ellen’s best friend, and the reason why she and Andy got together in the first place.  Ellen and Margot met when they were freshman in college and, as luck would have it, roommates.  They would go on to room together throughout their college careers, and then again when Margot decided to move to NY and take Ellen with her.  Naturally, when Ellen and Andy began dating, Margot was thrilled, especially when comparing Andy to Ellen’s last love, Leo.  Andy was everything that Leo wasn’t.  He was sweet and courteous, he didn’t think that the world revolved around him, and he was interested in what Ellen was doing and what she had to say.  All in all, they were a perfect fit, creating a good life with each other…until Leo came back into the picture.

When Ellen runs into Leo on the street corner, her first instinct is to run away, but she finds that she cannot contain her curiosity as to what he has been up to and if he’s still the same person that she once knew.  Leo offers her the job of a lifetime, which Ellen turns down, only to be offered the same job through her agent not soon after.  Ellen travels to LA with her sister Suzanne – the only person that she has told about Leo – for her photo shoot, and is surprised when none other than Leo is there.  This sets off a chain of events – one of which being that she and Andy move to Atlanta to be closer to his family and so he can work with his father in the family business – that leads Ellen to make the decision of her life.  Will she stay with her husband despite the not-so-idyllic new city they live in, or will she go back to the one who broke her heart?

Love the One You’re With is a tale about a woman in a crossroads of her life, and the way that she goes about dealing with the situation.  One may not agree with how she handles things, but, if you were put into a similar situation, would you not at least contemplate doing the same?  I love this story because it shows that we’re all just human, we all have faults and weaknesses, some of which – in Ellen’s case – may be stronger than others, but at the end of the day, we make the right choices (one would hope) for our lives, as Ellen does with hers.  I leave you with a quote!
 

“Sometimes there are no happy endings.  No matter what, I’ll be losing something, someone….But maybe that’s what it all comes down to.  Love, not as a surge of passion, but as a choice to commit to something, someone, no matter what obstacles or temptations stand in the way.  And maybe making that choice, again and again, day in and day out, year after year, says more about love than never having a choice to make at all.”

Posted on by saraelizabeth419 · 1 Comment

A.S.A. Harrison’s The Silent Wife

Referred to as this year’s Gone Girl, of which I cannot draw comparison seeing as how I’ve never read the former, A.S.A. Harrison’s The Silent Wife is anything but your ordinary thriller.  Told in an alternating duel narrative with chapters labeled “him” and “her,” the reader is thrown into the deteriorating relationship of Todd and Jodi: Todd is a serial cheater and Jodi lives mostly in denial.  We are told that Todd becomes the victim of a murder.  We are also told that Jodi is the one who kills him.  We know the end, but what we don’t know are the details leading up to it, or, for that matter, the details of the murder itself…which makes for an interesting story.  With every page I turned, I found myself constantly trying to put the pieces together, but it was not until it was actually happening that I knew.

Jodi and Todd had been together for twenty years, living in a spacious two-floor condo with a waterfront view as man and wife, only they had never actually gotten married.  Todd had proposed to Jodi multiple times, but due to a fear that stemmed from her childhood, she never said yes…a fact which later on in the novel she comes to regret.  Todd owns a real estate development business, making most of the money in the household; he owns the condo that they live in and supports Jodi.  Jodi works part-time as a psychotherapist, seeing patients in her home, making up funny names for them like Miss Piggy.  Through the years that Todd and Jodi have been together, Todd has strayed for the occasional affair but he has always come back.  Jodi has been aware of these, but since she seeks to avoid confrontation at all costs, has never brought up her knowledge to him (although Todd knows that she knows), instead choosing to punish him in different ways, as we are witness to one of these in the beginning of the novel.  Todd’s newest affair however, turns out to be the beginning of the end for him and Jodi, when Natasha, a young twenty-something devises a way to keep Todd in her life for good: she becomes pregnant.

The situation wouldn’t have become as complicated as it did if Natasha wasn’t the daughter of Todd’s best friend Dean (Jodi and Todd had literally watched Natasha grow up), and if Natasha wasn’t so controlling.  While I have yet to pick out a favorite character in this novel, she is definitely not on my short list.  Natasha is an instigator, constantly demanding things of Todd, the first and foremost of which is to marry her and pay for an expensive wedding complete with couture brides-maid gowns. I love fashion, but one has to ask the question, is that really necessary?  I think not.  Had Todd lived (because we know that he doesn’t live happily-ever-after), could Natasha have been exactly what he needed to settle down for good?  Probably not.  As the novel progresses, Natasha becomes more and more unreasonable, and I think that it was only a matter of time before he would start another affair and go back to Jodi.

Aside from a slow beginning, and a few awkwardly written sessions of Jodi with a therapist she had to see as part of her training (and I say awkwardly written because it’s structured like dialogue in a play, which seems a bit off-putting for a novel…at least to me), A.S.A. Harrison’s The Silent Wife will have you guessing until the very end.