The multitude of characters in Three Days Before the Shooting, Hickman, Bliss/Sunraider, Severen, Janey, Lee Willie Minifees, Jessie Rockmore, Lavatrice, McIntyre, the cross-eyed woman, and the rest, have such blood and bone truth in their presentations that the book could be a documentary about life in 1950s. Much as the blues music of the 1950s reflected life of the Black populations, the characters in this novel reflect both the segregated and integrated realities of 1950s America.

What is most magnificent about Three Days Before the Shooting is Ellison’s command and use of words. This novel is rich and deep and thick with words. Open the book to any page and you will become immersed in the movement and play of monologues, observations, recollections, letters, speeches, and sermons. The novel reads like music, a baroque rendition of the blues with layers of sounds, rhythms, and meaning communicating hopes and heartbreak, the painful smack of reality and the endurance of just getting on with it all. People talk “white” or talk “black”, and tell the truth of what they’ve seen as they see the truth to be. These variations together build the story of Hickman, Bliss, and Severen, but most importantly, the words build towards a crescendo of truth about race and identity in America.

The way in which Ellison constructed his novel — how he uses words to both illuminate and obfuscate the truth behind his story of a white child raised by a black man — is a deliberate deployment of what Ellison sees as a legacy of slavery: “the way we talk… you know that our people like to talk around a subject even when there’s no danger. They enjoy it, and if they know you well enough they’re apt to leave their true subject unstated so you’ll have to supply the missing meaning.” Ellison uses the linking narratives of his many characters to circle around and around the novel’s underlying truth. At times the different layers are dizzying. The novel becomes a maze of differing points of view and of tangents gone off on and then returned from; we are returned back to the main story but from a different angle, and we see everything in a new way.

Hickman warns Bliss of the power of words: “Words are everything and don’t you forget it, ever.” Bliss takes the advice but he abandons the positive and life-affirming use of words that Hickman has tried to instill and instead resorts to life-negating rhetoric of hate and prejudice. A son rejects his father with words but the greater rejection is the wordless abandonment of a son by his true father. Ellison uses the words of one of the most powerful phrases, “Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?” to represent both the disbelief and the despair caused by such abandonment. Sunraider calls those words out when the assassin’s bullets strike; Hickman instructs Bliss as a child to recite those words during a dramatization of rebirth through Christ; and Ellison returns us again and again to the lamentation. It is not only the cry of Bliss and of Severen, neither to ever know their fathers. But more, much more, it is the plea of an entire population. The words evoke the abandonment of the Black slaves, set free by Lincoln but then left uncared for and undone. There is a marvelous scene of Black pilgrims visiting the Lincoln Memorial and reflecting on the promise of the man and the failure of a nation.

The breadth and bravery of Ellison’s writing is demonstrated by how he tackles his themes of what it means to be black in America, what it means to be white, and the promise and failure of the American Dream. It is a great pity that Ellison never finished this magnificent novel. Perhaps the novel could not be finished because Three Days Before the Shooting raises the issue of what race has to do with our identity as Americans and resolution of that question — who are we? — is far from being realized. We are still a nation divided by racial identity, more than forty years after Ellison began his novel. One hundred and forty years after the Juneteenth declaration that all Americans, black and white, are equal in the pursuit of and entitlement to happiness, liberty, and respect, we are still struggling with what these words - Black, White, American — mean. Ralph Ellison in Three Days Before the Shooting offers a vision that transcends race, recording both the common ground and the individual experiences that define who we are: Americans.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch at www.readallday.org

Published by Modern Library (Random House) - Hardcover - 1136 pages - $50.00

Abraham’s narration is genuine and clear; he is a boy we watch turn into a man and the process is painful, frustrating, awkward, and beautiful.  Abraham’s voice is one of conflicting emotions, uncertain status, threatened identity, and in turns hopeful and hopeless.  Paragraphs of questions underscore the uncertainty of Abraham’s life — “Who was she?  Who was this woman who so loved me while I slept yet was so uninterested in me when I was awake?  And which Abraham was I, the one my mother saw or the one my grandma knew; the one who needed to be scolded and coddled or the one who was deemed a man, albeit prematurely and without warrant?”; the questions that just keep coming, more and more questioning as Abraham grows from childhood into adulthood, questions that demonstrate the level of insecurity in terms of present needs (like food and medical care) and of future prospects (employment, health, family): “what chance do I have?”  Abraham wants to be a man but a man unlike the men he sees around him causing so much pain:”I had witnessed the damage other men caused and I didn’t want any part of being like the others, not their presence or absence.”

The most harrowing question posed, again and again, by Abraham and by the people of his community, is “What are the living supposed to do?….Should I cry out?…Should I demand to know why?  Do I plea for justice and peace?…I don’t know.” How to go on, when there is no future that can promise peace, sufficiency, stability?  Survival is through family (bonds of love), church (bonds of faith), or sadly, through escape via drugs that while destroying life, provide a buffer from pain and hopelessness that have become intolerable, or via mental illness, as seen in the character of Lindbergh, veteran of the Vietnam war and creator of magical helicopters to fly up and out of Ever Park.

Goodman creates a moving and unique relationship between Abraham and Donnell, the cousin who, although just five years older than Abraham, becomes his care giver, his protector, his touchstone, and his most faithful, believing, and exacting friend.  It is Donnell who must grow too soon into a man, and who skirts the line between what is legal and what is required for his family to survive; in the end, Donnell will be the one who blows his anger and frustration out in a game of basketball that is really a proclamation of worth, a manifestation of will, and a desperate bid for respect: “You leave it here.  Everything.  All the blood, sweat, tears.  Ain’t nothing that can stop you.”  When Abraham has to take stock of what his life has been and what he wants it to become, he recognizes the debt he owes to Donnell and the strength of the love he bears for him: it is a love that sustains Abraham as much as it sustains Donnell.

That is the strength of the hold of family love: it gives back as much as is given out. Love is the only lasting definite in the lives of the Singleton family, their existence  rife with transience (anyone could be shot dead at any time or hauled off to jail or just disappear into drugs) and uncertainty (lives, wasted and wasting, surround them).  But alongside the harrowing realities of daily life, love is the constant, whether it is the love of Donnell, protective and demanding; the love of Nice, so powerful that he cuts off all contact with his family when his own pain is too much for them to bear; the love of the grandmother, who does whatever it takes to keep the apartment and its inhabitants safe; the love of Aunt Rhonda, with her affectionate and obstinate pride in her family; or the love of Abraham’s mother, demonstrated through the care she takes of Abraham though she is still a child herself.  Love is a circle enveloping the Singleton family, even through its darkest hours of sorrow, hate, pain, and hopelessness.

Hold Love Strong is a powerful novel about one boy’s epic journey of survival against all odds.  That communities of insidious hopelessness, nonexistent opportunities, and failed political and civic promises exist is well-known and Hold Love Strong makes its truth a condemnation: communities of plenty are failing communities of need.  But Hold Love Strong is much more than a social commentary on failures of our society: it is a testament to the will to survive and to surpass. The book is fiction but every word of it rings true: in following its cycles of misery and possibility, of abandonment and connection, of loneliness and of brotherhood, we are all made witness to the enduring possibility — and our shared responsibility to foster that possibility — that any child can find wings and fly.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch, www.readallday.org

Published by Simon and Schuster - hardcover - 368 pages - $24.95

I-5 follows the path of Anya, a young Russian woman kidnapped into the world of involuntary sex traffic, shuttled from brothel to brothel in the United States. The premise of the book is that she’s being moved from Southern California to Oakland where Mr. Kupkin, her “owner” very much in the tradition of slavery everywhere, plans to expand his empire of young women, duped or stolen mostly from Eastern Europe. To get there entails a ride up I-5, the great (albeit boring) north-south highway of the West Coast. As they proceed north, Anya, her immediate boss & pimp Marty, a comic thug alternately called Pedro & the Tarantula & a nameless young woman who will be delivered to a new owner along the way, they get caught in the Central Valley’s infamous tule fog as well as the valley’s one growing-like-gangbusters industry, prisons. Things happen, people get separated & we get to see Anya’s complex (and ambivalent) relationship to her own slavery. More things happen & Anya & Marty reach Oakland, though not as they’d intended. More things happen still.

This is one of those books where you know from page 2, if not page 1, what Anya’s fate holds in store, though certainly not the what & how of it. Publishing the novel in a deeply noir format – Roderick Constance’s cover image is ironic without being comical – underscores what is predictable here, which is actually part of the fun of the book (how will Anya do it?). And Anya is the character here to whom Brenner is committed. To some degree, every other character in I-5 is defined by her, or at least by their function in her story.

If there are any weaknesses here, they’re relatively minor. Brenner gives us what amounts to a lesson in the history & meteorology of the Central Valley, setting up both the fog & the scene at the prison. This isn’t something Anya knows or understands, any more than she understands the back story of the young guard or of what Kupkin’s life is like in Atlantaguard stick—three days of carving for nothing.” Jaya thought of the designs she might have made on that ivory: kiwi vine and curved daggers. “They should make room for us. It’s time for new masters, new ideas. “If the court doesn’t come down soon, they will go,” said Hool. “It’s hot as a baker’s kitchen by the bridge. Brenner tells us all this & more because she wants us to know and in these postmodern times, nobody is worrying all that much about ontological or narrative consistency. If anything, Brenner makes great use of indeterminacy in the later chapters to reveal not just what happens but what can happen. But reading of the nature of tule fog or of the expansion of California’s prison system¹ feels disruptive – it was the one moment in the book where I could imagine becoming dislodged from the story itself.

Years ago, when she was writing the book that turned into The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, Kathy Acker & I had a long conversation about the nature of character. The great trick of narrative or figurative literature, of course, is that the language on the page integrates syntactically not into a greater argument or expository structure, but instead to a displacement, an invocation of a referred world. A character represents a particular configuration of this referred world, and the difficulty of this displacement is such that we commonly acknowledge that the highest compliment one can pay to a character is that he or she is “believable.” Anya certainly is believable, but she also is a cipher, a symbol of the thousands – millions, if we think of sex traffic on its worldwide scale – of young women who submit to rape everyday. Brenner wants us to see this world through the eyes of one woman, someone young enough still to remember what hope is, even if old enough now in experience to understand just how difficult this is. I-5 is in this sense a political novel, though Brenner never lets this obstruct our view of her character. Anya is someone you will never forget.

¹ In my work in the prison movement, 1972-77, I was the lobbyist responsible for stopping funding for new prisons and was successful in each of those years. But it was already evident that the Department of Corrections, the guard’s union and far right rural legislators were bringing together the unholy alliance that would see the system explode from the nine joints I had to deal with in the 1970s to the 33 of today. The Department of Corrections is now the second largest police agency in the United States, second only to NYPD.

Reviewed by Ron Silliman - Silliman’s Blog

Published by PM Press - 256 pages - paperback - $15.95

The story is unique, Goolrick’s writing terse but descriptive. As Ralph is waiting for Catherine’s train, I could feel the cold wind stinging his cheeks. It’s easy to envision the people of Truitt, WI, Catherine’s clothing, Truitt’s homes.
After reading several books recently that I didn’t enjoy, in part because I didn’t like any of the characters, Goolrick reminded me here that liking the characters is not a requisite for liking the book. Goolrick gives his characters fully fleshed out backgrounds that help the reader to understand their actions even as you are appalled by them. Because of this, the reader is able to hold onto a hope for the characters to become better people, to make better lives for themselves.

Despite the bitter winter setting, this is a story of lust and passions. As such, there is a great deal of description of the fulfillment of these passions that some readers may find uncomfortable to read. I wasn’t uncomfortable with it, but I did feel like there was too much of it. Likewise, Goolrick could become repetitive and often ran on too long in his descriptions of motives, feelings and thoughts. All of that I was able to overlook because thought the story was wonderful. There were twists and turns I didn’t see coming and I had no idea how this book was going to end until the final paragraph. I read this book as part of a book club and, honestly, was not sure that I would like it. Having lower expectations made my enjoyment of the book a very pleasant surprise.

Reviewed by Lisa Sheppard - http://litandlife.blogspot.com/

Published by Algonquin Books - Hardcover - 978-1565125964 - $23.95

But Usnavy’s life is very hard. He works every day at a bodega, fulfilling the ration cards of the people who line up for goods: “soap was scarce, coffee rare; no one could remember the last time there was meat.  Sometimes all he had was rice, or worse, those detestable peas used to supplement beans, or when ground up, used as a coffee substitute.”  He lives in one room with his beloved wife and daughter, a room without windows and with a floor always wet with leaks. The communal bathroom of the tenement is found by the swarm of flies that envelop it, and with every rainfall the danger of the entire building collapsing threatens. Every day more and more Cubans take to the sea, escaping to America.  When good friends leave, Usnavy becomes fearful that his own daughter will be next, drawn by the good fortunes of those who made it the ninety miles across the sea, and repelled by her father’s own “salao”, bad luck.

Usnavy owns a magnificent lamp, huge and glowing with varied colors of light from its many panels of decorative glass. Left to him as the only legacy from his mother, the lamp reminds Usnavy of all that is beautiful and possible in his world, and it connects him to the past, his mother and his Jamaican father (long ago disappeared at sea).  But one day Usnavy makes a discovery that connects him and his lamp to the history of Cuba itself.  Keeping the lamp and himself whole becomes a parable for the future of Cuba as Che dreamed of it: will the need for dollars overwhelm Usnavy or will the lifeblood of the lamp sustain him in his faith?

There are both incredible and quiet details in Ruins about daily life in Cuba: his daughter’s dinner of a meat sandwich but it is only wool marinated in spices, “the texture of the wool had been transformed into what they all imagined steak was like, something tender and chewy”; Usnavy’s three pairs of underwear, one to wear, one to wash while bathing, and one to keep ironed and folded in his small drawer; Usnavy’s nightly domino games with his friends in the plaza; the constant shadow of the U.S., both in Cuban history (Hemingway and the U.S. love affair with everything Cuban), in products (the best appliances are U.S. made), and in politics (the embargo, of course, as well as the 1994 invasion of Haiti by the U.S.); young girls in lycra plying the streets at night for tourist dollars; outdoor dances and government parades; Socialist Committee-sponsored abuse of those Cubans waiting in line for visas to America; the constant gnaw of hunger; and Usnavy’s long bike rides  through the streets of Havana.

These details, woven around a compelling and surprising plot, make for a beautiful book. But this is much more than a great historical mystery set in Cuba or the compelling story of one man’s spiritual conflict: this is a book that exposes the sufferings of the Cuban people, both before and after the Revolution.  No matter what your politics, the book underscores both the brutality of life before Che and Castro (no romanticizing of the period when the Upper Classes lived like royalty and the lower classes were kept down like animals), and the sufferings and deprivations of life under Castro.  Only misery and complete loss of hope could drive people numbering in the thousands to take to the sea in less than seaworthy crafts, braving ninety miles of  sharks and storms, just to get away from Cuba.

Usnavy will never leave: he is in love with his country, bound up with its history, proud of its revolutionaries, and still holding hope for its future.  Despite all that he suffers, we understand his attachment, it all makes sense as part and parcel of the man Obejas has created for us.  Usnavy is a good man, he shares what little he has: “that was his way; whatever was available was for everyone equally.  That was what he knew and understood.”  He is a quiet man with pleasure found in the riding of his bike, the playing of dominoes, watching the sea at night, and hearing the breathing of his wife and daughter while they sleep. He is the last man we would ever want to see hardened or bitter: his faith is too true, his needs so minimal, his efforts so sincere.  He desires only to “die old and contented…in the soft dapple of a primal Antillean night.”

This novel is an incredible affirmation of life and of the power of the survival instinct.  We want Usnavy to find refuge from suffering and loss, and we fervently hope that he never sees himself betrayed by his Revolution but that he lives contented in a dream of it; that the huge lamp survives, its history and its power intact.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch on readallday.org

Published by Akashic Books - paperback - 978-1933354699 - $15.95

“Novels aren’t just sources of solitary cogitation. They are social objects, and we use them to brandish our identities, mark our allegiances and broker our relationships. They can provoke passions as strongly as politics. Thanks to the intimate connection between story and reader, they impact upon us very personally, and can drive otherwise undemonstrative folk to feel they have a right–nay duty–to confront complete strangers with their zeal, and have thus been responsible for some of the most unexpected human encounters I’ve had.”–Molly Flatt, from her piece, “Bonding with Books,” in the Guardian’s Books Blog.

This book is wonderful because of its fabulous characters and delicious plot, all sprung from Estep’s original and uninhibited mind.  The people of this novel are maybe not wholly believable but I took them as mythical members of the wild and crazy New York universe and went willingly along on the spin-of-the-wheel ride of their lives.  Free will — and these women are wilful — meets those little flips of fate that round out into destiny, or sometimes just a one-night stand. The struggle facing our characters is the age-old mandate to connect (”just connect”) and the obstacles they face are the tried and true Guilt, Pleasure, and Duty.

The characters didn’t need the catalyst of the mother’s big secret to get moving.  They are never static and their movement brings change: forward marching, then retracting, then forward again, they  lurch on, rapacious and certain, then stop, regroup, become subdued and questioning.  All three of them face their own crisis of the heart and confrontation of the soul.  We admire them (I loved them) for being forced to look into the mirror and reacting so very honestly to what they see.

Estep is adept with words.  Her sisters and their mother are each narrator of different chapters and they all speak with distinct cadences and linguistic choices: we know them as well as by their rhythms and words as by their actions. Estep’s physical descriptions are right on and perfect: “The sky over Aqueduct was the color of dead television.”  She is often hilarious: “Her eyes were bright and her big curly hair had, I swear, gotten bigger and curlier.  She was verging on looking like Malcolm Gladwell.”  Estep can write great one liners, real Oscar Wilde zingers, like my favorite: “She has led an unconventional life and it has agreed with her.”  I wouldn’t mind that as my epitaph.

Read this great book about sisters and mothers and friends and lovers, and sex, dogs, food, and gambling.  It will leave you reaching out and grabbing hold of someone or some dog or some idea.  You’ll bake yourself a cake with white icing, you’ll commit to skinny dipping at least once a summer, and you’ll never, ever bet on a race unless you’ve done the homework.  Alice Fantastic will inspire you to take the gamble of your life and run with it.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch on readallday.org

Published by Akashic Books - paperback  -978-1933354811 - $15.95

Lydia doesn’t exactly miss her brother right away.  Her feelings are complicated.  Danny and his football playing friends spent years picking on her and calling her names, but he’s still her brother, and she has good memories from when they were little kids.  Danny, athletic and loud, took up a lot of space in the family, and his absence in their lives is huge.

Her parents are disconnected, drifting through the days in anguished grief.  They are hyper focused on finding their child- “Not you,” she tells herself; “their other child.”  Lydia feels forgotten at home.  It’s the opposite at school- everyone knows who she is. Even the most popular kids, the ones who never gave her the time of day before, suddenly want to know how she’s doing; what’s new with the investigation.  At times it seems she is who she is only in relation to her brother.

Lydia has a nerdy friend, David, with whom she talks about world politics and other brainy topics.  David is her only friend who is all hers- completely independent of her brother.  She is comfortable with David until his attraction for her becomes obvious, and they drift apart as things get awkward between them.  She then starts hanging around with cheery Lola Pepper, an admirer of her brother and captain of the flag team, falling into the party scene Danny vacated.

The Pasternaks hire a private investigator when the local police hit a wall with the case.  Lydia develops a crush on the PI and finds herself focused and energized; organizing and analyzing letters from strangers, looking for possible clues, going over mug shots, taking notes.  When the PI has exhausted most of the leads, he turns a suspicious eye on Lydia, freaking her out and turning her off.

I loved this book and couldn’t put it down.  Gershow nailed Lydia’s complex adolescent voice.  It reminded me of Melinda’s voice in Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson.  She’s smart, wry, sad, funny, damaged, and heartbreakingly real.  I ached for Lydia, especially as she lay awake night after night listening to the silence in the next room, her brother’s bedroom.  I cried at one bittersweet interaction with her dad, when “for the first time in a long time, I remembered a little bit that he loved me, so I loved him a little bit back.”   And the end.. well, the end tore me up.

The book is reminiscent of The Lovely Bones, from the title to the cover (the same blue) to the subject matter.  In both we have families that are disintegrating over a missing loved one.  And I also thought about Songs for the Missing by Stewart O’Nan, a book with a similar story about the disappearance of a teen.  But I preferred The Local News to both those books.  The Local News is Lydia’s story and told from her perspective alone, while the others are told from several perspectives, including the missing teen.  I thought the single narration was a more effective, less diluted way to tell the story.  But the main reason I preferred The Local News is because at the end we get to see Lydia as an adult and understand how the loss of her brother continues to affect her relationships years later.  In the wake of Danny’s disappearance, life has been forever altered.

Sharp, raw, and brilliantly written, this is a powerful book and one I can highly recommend.

Reviewed by Lisa Munley on her excellent blog Books on the Brain.

Published by Spiegel & Grau in hardcover - 978-0385527613 - $24.95

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery is a great book.  This beautiful, moving, and occasionally very funny novel tells the story of an amazing woman and a startling young girl, and their parallel and eventually joined paths to recognition of beauty, in the self and in the world.

Renee is the concierge of a very upscale building in Paris, a supremely intelligent and grammatically exacting woman, and Paloma is one of her tenants , a 12-year old girl already fed up with the falseness of the adults around her and doubtful about life’s possibilities. Renee is acutely aware and appreciative of life’s moments of beauty and yet is unable to grasp the absolute beauty within herself.  Paloma is a French, intelligent, and female prepubescent version of Holden Caulfield, a confused and disillusioned but still young and therefore reachable rebel.  Her thoughts are presented to us through her two thoroughly engaging and at times heartbreaking journals; from Renee we get her inner thoughts and observations through first person narration.

This book is about finding a reason to live but it is absolutely un-American in its prescription: there is no easy path, life is full of difficulties, and you are on your own.  But if you are honest and intelligent and exacting, you will find and appreciate the beauty that exists in relationships and music and nature and books.  The book is about the pure beauty that is possible in moments of genuine expression, the fleeting moments that can still last forever in our minds because of their beauty and truth.

If we are lucky, many such moments occur in our lives and we are mindful enough to grasp the beauty.  One rainy afternoon I spent in a Barcelona Art Museum over twenty-five years ago, I was stopped short by a painting. I will always remember the beauty of that painting (although I can remember neither author nor title), and the painting has its same power to bring peace to me now as it did then.  It is a simple landscape of a dawning sky over a dark hillside, with a hermit just coming out of his cave in the hill.  Apricot-orange lines had been painted in beyond the darkened hermit and his burrow to show the dawning of day;  looking at the painting I felt the thawing wind of spring, the precious beat of living, the gratitude for another day granted.  Memories of mornings I’d spent in the country entwined with the experience of seeing the painting, creating layers of time to be stored and later savored.  The moment of seeing that painting and the moments of experiencing what was presented in that painting are moments that, when brought back by remembering, have sustained and comforted me.

Renee is also aware of the threaded memories of life, and of the beauty that endures to sustain and inspire us to continue on with the sometimes heavy burden of living; she tries to pass that knowledge to Paloma, not through lessons or lectures, but through sharing of ideas and thoughts.  It is the joy of conversation, of realizing a shared observation or enthusiasm or dis-enthusiasm, that brings Paloma around to a new commitment to living, even when faced very suddenly with death.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog offers us Renee’s beautiful but thoroughly realistic appraisal of life. When she herself must re-examine what she thought she knew about herself, the forced examination does not undercut her appraisal but serves to support it even more: we understand, as she does, that by living fully observant and appreciative of the beauty that appears fleetingly in actual time but permanently in our minds, we can survive and surpass the mundane and trivial and superficial.  We can make connections and stave off alienation; each moment caught by our flourishing minds only makes all the moments to come better and better. Young Paloma commits herself to finding those “moments of always within never” as a reason to live and that reason is good enough for me.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch - On the Read all Day blog, Nina blogs about one book a day.

Published by Europa Books - paperback - 978-1933372600 - $15.00

I don’t know about others but I knew nothing about bipolar disorder or manic-depressive illness.

“Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it; an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.”

The author Kate had a perfect family with husband Mark and 3 children Chloe, Michael and Monica, all 3 years apart. Everything is going fine when the eldest daughter Chloe at the age of 17 suddenly experiences severe mood swings and depression. After doctor appointments and observations Chloe is diagnosed with Bipolar disorder. As the depression and mood swings increase, Chloe also starts hallucinating. She sees and hears things that are not there. Her relationship with her mother and siblings becomes strained due to her constant mood swings.

Kate also goes through a series of emotions like confusion, desperation, grief and guilt. Kate blames herself for not recognizing the signs early even though she knew there were a lot of cases of depression and substance abuse in the family.

When after constant monitoring Chloe’s illness becomes somewhat manageable, her son Michael is diagnosed with the same illness. He starts drinking and taking drugs to feel normal.

We can imagine what a mother goes through when one of her child falls sick, this twice is a mother’s nightmare. Kate has made a lot of sacrifices for her children. She explains the difficulties of living and caring for a chronically ill person. This one dialog had chills running down my spine. It’s when Chloe attempted suicide by cutting her nerves and after Kate patched her up.

“Through it all, Chloe did not fight me, did not talk, and did not respond. When we were finished, she raised her face to mine and stated matter-of-factly, “Next time I’ll cut the other way, straight down the vein. It’ll be faster and you won’t be able to fix it.” ”

This is also Kate’s story. She learned not to blame herself when she finally admitted to herself and to others that she is not responsible for what happened or will not be responsible for what happens in the future. Kate says she has come to terms with the fact that eradicating her children’s illness is not the solution.

“If we believe that disabilities must be altered or abolished, then we imply that the absence of disability equals a good life. But does it? Because if that’s true, one might deduce that anyone with a disability is inferior. That line of reasoning leads to a horrible, deeply disturbing, and dangerous arena.

Disability does not require solution or abolition, but understanding, and when necessary, temperature to allow the disabled to function more fully.

Bipolar disorder is a chronic mental illness. It does not go away. Chloe and Michael will always have it. It will forever alter their lives, and as a result, will alter ours too. Nevertheless, we embrace the experience and anticipate future legs of the journey because we know that this world, this life, offers everybody opportunities to learn and grow and evolve. ”

Okay, I’ll stop else I’ll end up quoting the entire book. All I can say is please, please, please read this book. It is sad, horrifying, depressing, uplifting, encouraging, gripping, informative, moving and hopeful. I hope Chloe, Michael and even Monica is doing fine. I hope the entire family is doing fine. I would like to take back my sentence ‘The author Kate had a perfect family…’ and correct it to ‘The author Kate has a perfect family…’. A family that supports one another, that understands each others problems and accepts it without judgment is nothing more than perfect.

Did you know that Napoleon, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Sylvia Plath, John Keats, Virginia Wolf, Vincent Van Gogh were possibly victims of Bipolar disorder?

Reviewed by Violet Crush of the excellent blog by the same name.