The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

 

Title: The Life Impossible

Author:  Matt Haig

Narrated by:  Joanna Lumley and Jordan Stephens

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Length: Approximately 10 hours and 43 minutes

Source: Audiobook Purchased from Audible 

If you could inherit your dream house, where would your dream house be located?  

Grace Winters is surprised to learn that an old acquaintance she was once kind to has left her a house on a Mediterranean Island. Grace is a retired math teacher who deals in the world of facts, on the island though, Grace learns there is so much more to life than hard facts.

My thoughts on this novel:

• The Life Impossible by Matt Haig was the January Pick for the Rogue (FLICKS) Book Club.  Only one other person read it, but we both enjoyed it.

• I enjoyed this unique novel and the thoughts about living life to its fullest.

• I enjoyed that Grace is a math teacher.  One of my favorite quotes is one she talks about a music teacher and says they are prone to eccentricities.  Ha! 

• Grace has a great love for Sherlock Holmes and Alexandre Dumas.  I also love when classic literature if referred to in fiction.

• Grace has great guilt over her son Daniel’s death.  Having my own son Daniel, this really gave me the feels when reading this novel.

• I liked the humor in this novel.

• I liked how the book looked at how we view our bodies.  As we get older, we look back at when we were younger and wish we could look like that again.  Grace wishes you could live in the moment knowing about your future self.

• This was an enjoyable audiobook with good narrators that held my interest.

• I enjoyed how this story went into different realms than expected and was speculative fiction.

Overall, The Life Impossible by Matt Haig was an enjoyable unique novel that made me think about life, loss, and love.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

 

The Sea of Tranquility was a beautiful and unique book that I couldn’t put down.  My husband, Ben, and I are currently watching Station Eleven, but Sea of Tranquility was my first novel by Emily St. John Mandel.  It takes place during four different time frames and involves time travel.  I loved it.

The novel starts with the younger son from an aristocratic family being shipped to Canada in 1912 because he has “radical” opinions that embarrass the family.  He has a strange experience in the woods on Vancouver Island.   In 2020, a concert is taking place where footage is displayed that was taped in the same woods in 1994 and a strange event occurred.  In 2203, Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour on Earth.  She is a resident of the second moon colony.  While at an airport, she has a moment where she hears music, sees trees, and has a strange experience.  Is this a glitch?   In 2401, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts is a security guard at a hotel on the first moon colony.  His sister and old friend work for the Time Institute.  He gets a job there and is soon an operative traveling through time to try to solve the question of these strange disturbances.  What are these glitches?

The writing of this novel was beautiful.  It started somewhat slow with different pieces of the story that seemed unrelated.  Then the pieces finally started to come together.  I was fascinated.  There were some deep thoughts about life and reality.  It is a short book and I read it quickly.

Favorite Quotes:

“Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic.  There’s an awful randomness about it.”

“I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in a ceaseless rush.”

Overall, Sea of Tranquility is a book I can’t stop thinking about.  It’s a beautiful novel with an intriguing story.

Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

Ines is alone and scared after a mysterious incident her senior year of high school.  Luckily, she has been accepted into the prestigious Catherine House.  It’s a school of higher learning with a three-year plan.  Part of this plan is cutting off contact with the outside world including your family and wearing the same clothes as everyone else.  Ines at first feels adrift at the school, but she makes friends and starts to realize that things are not quite right at the school.  There is a mysterious program, Plasm, that was ridiculed on the outside world and dismissed as a hoax, but Ines discovers it is still alive and active at Catherine House.  What is this mysterious Plasm curriculum and how does it impact the students?

 

I’ll admit the book was a bit slow for me at first.  You are following the prospective of Ines who is drunk and confused a lot at the start of the book.  Luckily, she settles down, makes friends, and starts to investigate.  Ines was running from something in her past that is alluded to, but not fully fleshed out.  I wish we would have learned more about that. It did stay consistent with the rest of the story and the confused thoughts of Ines.  I appreciated that this was the freshman class of 1996, which was the year I graduated from high school and started college.  There were a few references to music and CD players, but once at Catherine House, students are not allowed those luxuries.  It was also strange as you started getting into what was going on at this prestigious school of learning, it was very cult like and creepy.  I liked it.

 SPOILER ALERT:

Let’s talk about that ending.  I thought the ending was quite good.  Ines discovers that Catherine House is looking for lost souls like herself to use as part of the overall experiment.  They basically get plugged into the system and stay static in body and without thought.  Ines seems to be heading to that fate, but luckily through help from her friends she is able to escape to the outside.  What will happen to Ines now?  It’s interesting to think about.  Will the experiments ever be stopped at Catherine House?  Would she ever go back and set Baby free?

SPOILER END

Favorite Quote:

“But what if the space between this world and eternity wasn’t a happy place?  What if it was infinitely lonely and sad?”

Overall, Catherine House was a unique suspense novel with a flawed narrator.  I liked the concept and thought the ending gave one a lot to think about.

Book Source:  Review Copy from William Morrow.  Thank-you!

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

July 4, 1976.  It is the two hundredth birthday of the United States of America.  Dana is celebrating her 26^th birthday with her husband in their new apartment in California when she abruptly travels through time to a 19^th century plantation in Maryland just in time to save a young boy, Rufus.  Dana is a black modern woman, her husband Kevin is white, and Rufus is the white son of a planation owner.  Dana keeps traveling back and forth through time to save Rufus. She comes to realize that Rufus and a young freed woman name Alice are her ancestors.  She must keep them save to ensure that her own family line exists.  Will Dana be able to keep them and herself safe?

I have read a lot of great books lately, but this is definitely one of the best fiction novels I’ve ever read.  I have heard of Octavia E. Butler for a long time and this is the first book I’ve read that is written by her.  Butler put together this novel in an innovative way that makes you feel like you are experiencing the horrors of slavery.  The novel is told from Dana’s first-person point of view.  Dana being a modern woman transplanted back and experiencing slavery made it relatable to a modern-day audience.  I also thought it was eye opening when Dana’s husband travels back with her and as a white man, he experiences things very differently from Dana. 

I really loved how Dana was able to meet various people on and around the plantation and to understand what they were going through.  Each character had their own story and how they were able to pull together the strength to survive.  I cared for the characters and was pained by their suffering.  What I realized when I got to the end of the novel was that slavery changed all people that it involved for the worse.  The slaves had to endure and act in ways they would not naturally to survive and the owners became cruel creatures that took what they wanted without care for their own souls.  Dana’s ancestor Alice as a free woman of color who was forced into slavery had a very tragic story that I cannot stop thinking about.  The way that children were taken from people and sold for literally anything including new furniture, was heart breaking.

My copy of Kindred had a great Reader’s guide that discussed the story in more detail.  It said that Butler had heard a classmate rale against his ancestors and their submissiveness before the civil rights and black power era.  Butler extensively researched slavery and came to understand that the seeming submissiveness was a way that some people survived during a brutal time.  While they outwardly appeared submissive, their souls were in rebellion. There were also great discussion questions at the end of the book.  This would make an excellent book club selection.

I love time travel books.  In this novel, there is no scientific or really any explanation at all for why Dana travels through time.  The question is not really the why, but the journey that Dana experiences.  I read that Butler’s other novels dive much deeper into science fiction.  I need to check them out.  I have mostly read white male sci fi authors throughout my life and I would love to see another perspective.

Favorite Quotes:

"The fire flared up and swallowed the dry paper, and I found my thoughts shifting to Nazi book burnings. Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of ‘wrong’ ideas."

“This could be a great time to live in," Kevin said once. "I keep thinking what an experience it would be to stay in it— go West and watch the building of the country, see how much of the Old West mythology is true."

"West," I said bitterly. "That’s where they’re doing it to the Indians instead of the blacks!"

He looked at me strangely. He had been doing that a lot lately."

"I am not a horse or a sack of wheat. If I must seem to be property, if I have to accept limits on my freedom for Rufus's sake, then he also has to accept limits - on his behavior towards me. He has to leave me enough control of my own life to make living look better to me than killing and dying."

Overall, Kindred is an excellent novel that puts the reader into the middle of slavery through the first-person perspective of Dana, a time traveler from the modern era.  It delves into how slavery was morally corrupting for all involved and truly evil, but it also gave hope for the future.

Book Source:  Purchased from Amazon.com

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

I wasn’t sure what to expect with The Testaments.  What direction would Atwood take the world she had so vividly created in The Handmaid’s Tale?   From almost the first page, I was sucked into this new story and couldn’t stop reading until it was complete.

The story is told from three different viewpoints.  One view point is the diary of Aunt Lydia as she tells of life after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, but she also flashes back to how she became Aunt Lydia.  It was fascinating.  The second view point was of a young girl named Daisy who is growing up in Canada is a used clothing store.  Her story immediately seemed off to me as she thought of her parents by their first names and never as her parents.  The third view point is of a young girl named Agnes who is growing up in Gilead with her friend Becka.  After Agnes’s mother passes away, she finds herself adrift in her world searching for meaning.  When all three stories collide, the future of Gilead itself will change.

I loved the world that Atwood created and continued.  I especially loved her characters.  Their stories were relatable and unrelatable living in a world that seems plausible and not that far from our own.  The choices they made and the consequences were riveting to think about.  I don’t want to ruin the plot of this book for others so I will not go into detail.  I will say I enjoyed every second of it, especially the ending.

Favorite Quotes:

“Only dead people are allowed to have statues, but I have been given one while still alive.  Already I am petrified.”

“I imagine you expect nothing but horrors, but the reality is that many children were loved and cherished, in Gilead as elsewhere, and many adults were kind through fallible, in Gilead as elsewhere.”

“I don’t remember that school day much, because why would I?  It was normal.  Normal is like looking out a car window.  Things pass by, this and that and this and that, without much significance.  You don’t register such hours; they’re habitual, like brushing your teeth.”

“There was a certain power in it, silence and stillness.”

“Becka said that spelling was not reading:  reading, she said, was when you could hear the words as if they were a song.”

“The aims of Gilead at the outset were pure and noble, we all agree.  But they have been subverted and sullied by he selfish and the power-mad, as so often happens in the course of history.”

Overall, Atwood achieves the impossible by creating a riveting sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale that furthered the story while being an unputdownable story of its own.

Book Source:  The Kewaunee Public Library.  Thank-you!