This Book Will Save Your Life

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In the title story, a Holocaust survivor taps into a theme of the collection when he describes the way people hold the history of previous generations inside them. I consumed these stories exactly like a spectator of a good fight or a neighbor peering through the hedge, and I felt sharply observed in turn. Only in the last third of the novel, when Richard's 17-year-old son arrives after many years of separation, does the story make an emotional connection that doesn't seem contrived. g., an automated voice versus a “live” person, and so on—all tells me a lot about who we (Americans) are as people and who we are becoming.

And Richard on having a CT scan, “it was like test-driving a coffin, as though they were scanning him to make a 3-D model—a virtual death;” or Cynthia lamenting her unappreciative family: “I’m non-existent, I’m like a floor lamp. I don't want to spoil the ending, but the book does tend to downgrade the awkward stuck-with-you challenges of family relationships in favour of the elective, disposable pleasures of friendship. The girl and the vet lead Lucky up the hill toward home—feet stomping as if in protest of the indignity of it all. He’s fighting with his father, yelling at him while riding the teacups or waiting for Space Mountain and Richard is taking it, feeling like he deserves it. He is functionally dead and doesn't even notice until two incidents (an attack of intense pain that lands him in the emergency room and the discovery of an expanding sinkhole outside his house) conspire to hurl him back into the world.

Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful.

I’ve always been interested in ideas about our culture, the morality underneath the way we live: Do we think we are good people, doing the “right” thing? There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions. I would be done reading for the day and my heart would ache because I missed the characters so much. For that reason alone I'm glad I read this book, and it's the reason it has two stars rather than one.The sight of a horse hovering overhead, a horse in a sling, tethered to a helicopter, is something you'd never imagine. If the Great American Novel tends to tell of the outsider looking for and grasping at the American Dream, A.

Homes is confident and consistent in her odd departures from life as we know it, sustaining credibility by getting details right.When Richard arrives home he notices that the sinkhole near his house just got bigger and he gets scared and anxious. So begins Neil Strauss’s harrowing new book: his first full-length work since the international bestseller The Game, and one of the most original-and provocative-narratives of the year.