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You are here: Home / Archives for books

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Book Review: If I Stay, by Gayle Forman

29th April 2011 By Julianne 1 Comment

Photo by jay~dee

It’s a snowy day in Oregon, and so Mia and her brother Teddy have the day off school. Her father is a teacher, and her mother doesn’t want to be the only one working, so they decide to make the most of the day and go visit some friends. They all get into the car, but, on the road, a truck crashes into their vehicle.

The next thing Mia knows, she’s standing at the side of the road, looking at the wreck of the car. But how can she be standing there, when moments before she was inside the car, pretending to be playing cello along to the radio? She finds her body, and realises that she’s some kind of ghost. All she can do is follow as her body is taken away to hospital, watching and listening to doctors, nurses, relatives, and friends as they visit her. Or that’s what she thinks at first. But soon she finds out that she has a decision to make. To follow her parents, or to live on, to stay.

If I Stay has been a huge hit amongst book bloggers, so I had decided a while ago that it was something that I wanted to read. However, I wasn’t expecting to like it as much as I did. I don’t usually choose to read books that I know will be sad. I don’t mind if I’m reading a book that happens to have some tear-inducing sections, but I wouldn’t ordinarily pick out a book about death, for instance. Just the title of Before I Die makes me cringe away! I guess I have this preconceived notion that books about an issue like death will be bleak and depressing all the way through.

To say that If I Stay is a sad book to read would be the understatement of the flipping decade! Mia has a wonderful family, and they die! She has her whole life ahead of her, and she’s considering leaving it behind! Tears came to my eyes at least four times whilst I was reading it. However, If I Stay was not relentlessly sad all the way through. When I was reading about Mia’s family, or her relationship with Adam, I would forget for a couple of pages that it was all doomed, and enjoy it as naturally as I would if those scenes had appeared in any other novel. But then we’d be back to Mia at the hospital, and the tragedy would seem all the more tragic. Also, because Mia’s friends and remaining family members were so brilliant, I couldn’t help but hope that she wouldn’t choose to go. I wanted her to stay, as hard as that would be for her to live through, and that kept me reading on.

I really loved the characters. I liked that the teenage characters were relatively mature (though it made the events all the more devastating). I adored all the quirks, from Mia’s dad’s bow ties, to her grandmother’s obsession with angels and returning spirits in animal forms. Even the nurses had individual traits, which made every one that much more memorable, and made the story seem fully fleshed out. I also really liked the role that music played in the story, and the writing was beautiful, with the descriptions and Mia’s thoughts balanced out nicely by dialogue.

I was gripped from the start of If I Stay to the finish, and I am looking forward to reading more books by the author. I would recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind crying a little bit whilst reading!

Review by Luisa at Chicklish

Review at So Many Books, So Little Time

The BookDepository

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: American, bereavement, book review, books, classical music, death, Gayle Forman, punk rock, review, teen fiction, teenage, teenage fiction, YA, young adult

Book Review: We Had It So Good, by Linda Grant

31st March 2011 By Julianne Leave a Comment

Photo by Scott Thompson

We Had it So Good is a novel that has several main characters, but is focused on Stephen, an American who comes as a postgraduate student to Oxford in the Sixties. There he meets his future wife, Andrea, and her friends Grace and Ivan, and although he is scientifically-minded, he joins their hippie group and even starts to use his skills to manufacture LSD. It all goes well until he gets sent down (that’s Oxbridge for ‘expelled’) for tearing a page out of a library book, and is conscripted into the US army. Luckily for Stephen, Andrea is willing to marry him so that he can stay in the UK and avoid the draft, and so the novel follows this quartet as they grow up and move through life, finding careers, having children, and dealing with their family histories. Stephen and Ivan seem to find life the easiest, with families that are happy to look after them, whereas psychotherapist Andrea is trying to move on from her difficult childhood, and the glamorous, self-centred Grace is attempting to run away from her own past. The novel also features Marianne and Max, Stephen and Andrea’s children, as they begin adulthood in the present day.

I really enjoyed reading We Had It So Good. The characters were very interesting and believable, and although I found Stephen to be the least fascinating, I still thought he worked well as a focal point, with his family history playing such an important part in the way he sees the world. I thought that this novel had the right balance of description, emotion, and dialogue. Although the pace is slow, it works well with the style. The is not a novel with a gripping plot, there are some mysteries about the characters for us to chase through the pages, but on the whole the quality of the writing, and the themes of the novel, were what kept me interested. This is a portrait of a generation of the middle class (lots of reviewers just call We Had It So Good a portrait of a generation, but I have to point out that it’s a generation of the middle class, working-class experiences were different) that was full of contradictions. They start off their adult lives embracing counterculture, but end up almost defining convention, as middle-class clichés. They were lucky, but not grateful. They felt guilty about their children’s problems, but didn’t do anything much about them, perhaps considering them as inevitable as their own good fortune. I found it quite annoying that Stephen lacks ambition, expecting good things to just come to him, and doesn’t really make his own ‘big’ choices. His life is arranged at the start by his father, and later, his wife. It’s not that they control him, far from it, but that he lets them solve his problems, and ultimately design his life. Although she is an irresponsible, overly self-assured person, I actually had more respect for Grace because of this. I’m not sure whether this is exactly what the author intended, or if it’s just me being young and idealistic! I suspect it may be a combination of the two!

I only have one real criticism. The story is told in slightly-disconnected scenes, which is a very concise method of storytelling, but I didn’t really feel like I had a full sense of what family life was like for any of the characters. Stephen’s story pretty much begins when he leaves home to go to Oxford, and Marianne and Max don’t get much childhood in the novel, just a couple of scenes. This may just be a matter of personal taste, but I like to see how characters interact, and learn how they feel about each other that way. They all have definite opinions of each other – Stephen can barely stand Grace, Grace can barely stand everyone else, Marianne is afraid that her mother will make her analyse things she believes just are, Max finds his father too loud – and you do get to see Stephen and Grace’s irritation in action, but not very much of Marianne negotiating conversations with her mother, or Max enduring his father’s loudness. My favourite scenes were those that involved interactions between Stephen and his father, Si. I liked that Si was even more straightforward than Stephen felt himself to be, and that this made Stephen feel and act slightly awkward around him. I would have liked to know more about Stephen’s mother and his sisters, but to be fair, Stephen is on the other side of the Atlantic to them for most of the novel.

A much more minor thing that bothered me was the repetitive reminders of certain things. I hadn’t forgotten that Stephen had tried on Marilyn Monroe’s mink stole as a child 100 pages, or even 200 pages later. I hadn’t forgotten that Andrea had only ever gone to bed with Stephen either, yet that fact was repeated over and over as well. I guess that I was supposed to feel that these things were playing on the characters’ minds but the reminders weren’t accompanied by much in the way of contemplation.

We Had It So Good was the first title to be selected for the new Virago Book Club, and I received a copy to review through the First Look programme. If I’d never heard of Linda Grant, and was looking at bookshop or library shelves to choose something to read, I wouldn’t normally be interested enough in the subject matter and time period to take it home. However, I have read good reviews of some of Linda Grant’s other books, and I have a copy of The Clothes on Their Backs on my TBR, so I probably would have read We Had It So Good eventually. I am glad to have been sent a copy to review as I got to read it much sooner!

The BookDepository

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: 60s, book club, book review, books, British, Linda Grant, literary fiction, review, Virago, Virago First Look

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Hi! I'm Julianne and this is my book blog. Click my picture to read more about me.

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