Relationships | Book Chatter

A Little Life
By Hanya Yanagihara
(Doubleday Books, Hardcover, 9780385539258, March 2015, 736pp.)

The Short of It:

This story will shatter you into a million little pieces but you need to read it anyway.

The Rest of It:

*No spoilers*

This isn’t the type of book where there is a huge plot reveal but not knowing its true subject does lend a rather precarious nature to the reading experience. Because of that, I won’t go into what the book is really about.

What I will say, is that it’s a book about friendships and relationships and the pain that comes with knowing that it’s impossible to really know everything about a person, no matter how close you are to them.

The book spans three decades and follows the lives of four men, all friends from college. We see them at their best, and their worst. There’s Malcolm, an architect of sorts, Willem, an up and coming actor, JB, a self-absorbed but extremely talented artist and Jude, a brilliant attorney who happens to be the center of the story.

Jude is damaged by the events of the past, but he’s struggling to realize his self-worth and it’s a brutal struggle to witness. There’s pain, lots of it, heart wrenching events that will twist your stomach into knots, but the writing! It’s so damn beautiful. I read it on my Kindle and every other paragraph is highlighted because I just couldn’t stand to leave the page without marking its passage in some way.

I loved every minute I spent with this book. It’s over 700 pages long and usually, I set my reading at a good pace to finish in a reasonable amount of time, but not with this one. This one I lingered on for a long, long time.

It’s by far, the best book I’ve read this year and as soon as I turned that last page, I wanted to run out and buy a physical copy just to admire it on the shelf. THAT COVER though. Don’t click on that link unless you want a hint at what some of it’s about. It’s an image that can mean many things and let me tell you, it does.

Have I completely scared you now? I hope not because it’s really such a wonderful book and I will continue to sing its praises until someone tells me to stop.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

The Children’s Crusade
By Ann Packer
(Scribner Book Company, Hardcover, 9781476710457, April 7, 2015, 448pp.)

The Short of It:

This novel has normal written all over it and yet it’s the most unsettling story I’ve read in a while.

The Rest of It:

The story opens with the promise of young love. Penny and Bill begin their lives together. He’s a doctor, she’s an artist and the home they buy holds the promise of happiness to come. They have four children, Rebecca, Robert, Ryan and James. All should be golden but that last child is not like the other children and his behavior and presence is a constant reminder that you cannot control everything and for Penny, this proves to be too much. She moves out of the house and into a shed in the backyard. The shed, her “studio” becomes a home for her, a home away from her children and her husband and her responsibility as a mother.

What makes this story so unsettling is how they all react to it. Bill seems to know exactly what is going on but is in denial. The children, old enough to know that things are not right, talk about a crusade to bring her back. But how do you bring back a woman who wants nothing to do with who she is?

I had a really hard time with this one. Mostly, the subject matter is what did me in because the writing itself was really quite good. Penny, is a hard one to understand and Bill, oh man, I was so frustrated with Bill. As large families tend to do, they do come together in times of crisis but everyone seems to dance around James and all of his problems. As a reader, I didn’t feel as if we spent enough time with the children as children. They grow into adults quite quickly and so I was left with a sense of longing… lost childhood and all that. Penny was so elusive and odd and although I did manage to see another side to her towards the end, I felt that it came too late.

I didn’t love this story but this isn’t the kind of story anyone loves. It’s frightening to see a family in this light and Packer does an excellent job of throwing it all under the microscope. No one in this novel stands out as a hero. Everyone is flawed and unflattering in some way. It’s a book full of faults and if Packer intended for it to be that, then she succeeded in a spectacular fashion. How do the events of our childhood shape who we are today? Lots to consider while reading this one.

Overall, I didn’t care for the story or the characters in it but there’s something there that deserves to be pondered a bit more.

Source: Sent to me by the publisher via Edelweiss
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

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