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Title: Going to the Sun by James McManus ISBN: 0-06-092804-2 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 February, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.93 (15 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Inside a Woman?
Comment: Here's what I liked about GOING INTO THE SUN. First, James McManus seems to have great insight into womanhood. My female friend who recommended this novel agreed. In this respect, the book is artful and ingenious. The internal talk within the main character is utterly fascinating. Second, McManus has a rare command of the English language. He is able to put words together that creates such a vivid portrayal of the characters, they do NOT appear to be fictional. Reading this book is more like watching a movie. McManus creates pictures in my mind.
Now, I don't like many of the outcomes that happened in the book. I suspect my uneasiness is related to McManus vivid writing style. I would describe many passages in the book as "unnerving" and "distressing." McManus' writing can put the reader on edge. You're not going to like it, but you won't be able to stop reading.
At the beginning, I had a great admiration for the heroine, Penny Culligan. I was astounded with this disabled woman's courage. My admiration for her grew stronger and stronger by each passing page. However, in the end I felt "let down." She chickened out! But then again, after some reflection (and this book WILL make you reflect), it couldn't have ended any other way. My admiration was renewed.
Rating: 5
Summary: Engaging tale of love, death and chronic illness
Comment: This novel snaked its way around my heart, and its characters have been lingering in my head for days. I'm hesitant to start in on another book because I don't want the world of Penny, the Saint and Ndele to be edged out of my consciousness.
I'm curious to know what the author's personal experience with chronic illness is, because he has so perfectly captured what it feels like to inhabit a broken down body. The novel's protagonist, Penny, has a severe case of juvenile-onset diabetes. Living with a pervasive chronic illness is living with an ornery beast inside of you. Some days he leaves you alone and sleeps, but most of the time he's hungry and wants to devour your energy and spirit from the inside. You wrestle him, sometimes tame him, often ignore him as he gnaws on your leg--it's a chaotic cycle of confrontation and denial, victory and defeat.
Penny is so drawn into the struggle with her diabetes that she finds it difficult to establish a positive sense of self, to identify herself as anything but a failure. The illness feels like punishment, evidence of her unworthiness. This makes it difficult for her to connect with other people.
And then the first person she starts to connect with--a college boyfriend she calls the Saint--gets literally devoured by a beast, an Alaskan bear. For the next seven numb years, she stumbles around academia back in Chicago. She decides to embark on a summertime cross-country bike trek back to Alaska, both to escape and to confront. To escape the stultifying academic environment, an overbearing dissertation advisor and a way-overdue dissertation. And to confront her body's decay and her mind's obsession with how and why her boyfriend died.
The bulk of the novel chronicles her journey and the dialogue that runs through her head as the bike wheels tick off Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana... It's not a glamorized journey: cheesy motels, aggressive road-hogging trucks, dubious road conditions, and sweaty t-shirts abound. But along the way she learns that something as little as a pothole can change your life. And that healing comes not from a syringe, but from the power of connecting with another human being--the healing of human kindness, the healing of human touch.
What's amazing is that within this beautiful story, the author integrates provocative issues like racism and euthanasia seamlessly. They come up naturally, as part of the story, rather than stick out as "this-is-a-novel-of-the-90's" issues du jour.
As someone living with a beast of a chronic illness myself, I can testify that the author's treatment of illness is spot-on. The book will linger on my nightstand, and in my heart, for quite some time, as I reread passages and smile again at how a cranky protagonist not unlike myself finds what she needs in the unlikeliest of ways.
Rating: 3
Summary: Promising but comes up short
Comment: This book starts off really well and seems to present what will be a complex and compelling story of Penny's anguish and struggle as a woman in dealing with her tragedy of years before. But as the book went on I found it to be describing too much of simply what she was doing, and not enough of why and what she was thinking, or what she hoped for in the end. Toward the end it lost something for me, which was disappointing considering the book's beginning and overall premise.
Her internal struggle mentally and emotionally should have been given much more attention than the mechanics of her diabetes and daily rides. The relationship with Ndele could have been explored deeper to see exactly what it was she was hoping to develop with him.
Overall, a good read, but could have gone much further and deeper
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Title: Jarhead : A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles by Anthony Swofford ISBN: 0743235355 Publisher: Scribner Book Company Pub. Date: 04 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker by James McManus ISBN: 0374236488 Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux Pub. Date: 01 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Eragon (Inheritance, Book 1) by Christopher Paolini ISBN: 0375826688 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 26 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Life of Pi by Yann Martel ISBN: 0156027321 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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