Posts tagged novels

BOOK REVIEW– Bridge To Haven

Book Reviews 6 Comments

Title: Bridge to Haven
Author: Francine Rivers
Publisher/Publication date: Tyndale House Publishers Inc./2014
Edition: 1st ed. Paper back copy. 459 pages.
ISBN: 978-1-4143-6818-4

What does Haven signify? Literally, it is a place of rest or safety.
In this book, Haven is the name of a town. The book title signifies a place of grace and mercy for each person. Literally, to enter the town of Haven, you must pass through a particular bridge. Abra Matthews found it hard to come to that bridge once again.
Metaphorically, she also found it hard to pass through that redemption bridge which only Jesus provides.
The Story.
Abra doesn’t feel like ‘somebody’. She feels neglected and unloved. She believes she was adopted at age 5, out of a sense of Christian duty, from the couple who had earlier rescued her when she was found abandoned as a day old baby.
With Mitzi though, she feels differently. Old Mitzi shares her taste for music, is fashionable and doesn’t hesitate to give a piece of her mind.
Pastor Zeke has this to think of Mitzi:
“




Zeke knew Mitzi as a woman of wits and wisdom… Life experiences didn’t always bring wisdom but in Mitzi’s case it brought a great deal more. She said she’s been passionate in sin, but she was even more so in repentance. She had the gift of compassion for outcasts to prove it.

“
At age17, this growing red-haired beauty gets lured away from the ones who love her to a place of fame- Hollywood.
She think she’s found love but she is in for a rude awakening. She thinks she’s finally become accepted and respected but finds out fame comes at a terrible price.
Review:
I’m afraid of giving spoilers but I find the plot to be predictable in any case. Inspite of this, it’s a very loaded book, with lots of suspense.
I find the root of Abra’s problem to be the thought that she is unloved. Several references were made as to her thoughts of being a castaway even though she was hugely loved.
We get to contrast love and lust. For one, love is patient.
Francine is good with evoking emotions and well, emotions matter greatly.
It’s a lovely and warm read. I think lots of lessons can be gleaned from the book ranging from patience as an attribute of love, to parenting, and life choices. The Story also had to do with the war between North and South Korea and America’s involvement owing to the United Nations.
Francine Rivers brings it as true and as hot as it gets again. I respect the writing process of this book. Francine always appears diligent with her research and I respect that. Fine details of the Hollywood life and fine attention to every character.
The main characters are Abra, Joshua, Pastor Zeke, Penny, Ryan and Franklin Moss. My favourite character is Joshua.
I think this is a good read. I’ll buy this book for every young and ambitious girl with stars in her eyes. I’ll also recommend it to everyone for its central theme which I deduce to be “Love is patient”.
I recommend it very greatly to teenagers and to everyone at large. I rate it 4.0/5 stars.
On the war:





“




Every soldier who goes looking for comfort, comes back with VD…I have my pocket Gideon bible on me at all times and read it every chance I get. It calms me, gives me hope. Men call me “preacher”, and not in the mocking way they did in boot camp. When death hunts men, they look for God…”

“Being with Gil made Joshua remember the things he’d been taught. “I forgot the rules” he’d addmited to Gil once during one of their early conversations.
“What rules?” Gil had asked.

Rule no one: young men die. Rule number two: you can’t change rule number one. I heard it in training, but forgot it in battle.”

“Sometimes God has to destroy in order to save. He has to wound in order to heal”

 As always,
Debby.
Have you read this book? Are you interested in reading this? Do you have another recommendation for share? Pray tell…

26a–BOOK REVIEW

Book Reviews 5 Comments

Long time no book review, eh?
I have this condition where my eyes feel so heavy, even when I’ve done nothing but sleep conveniently. I’ve Google searched (why not? this is 2017) and I’ve started praying.
Right now I could just close my eyes and refuse to write this post but then I’d be hard pressed to repeat a post on blogging and consistency.
26a. Can I start by saying I had reservations about reviewing this book. I know that a book review doesn’t mean total endorsement. I also know that appreciation of a book doesn’t mean acceptance of the author’s worldview and all of the book’s message.
However, not all readers know that. Hence my express disclaimer: I do not agree with some of the messages of this book but it piques my interest well enough and I’m willing to review it as a piece of art.
Title: 26a.
Author:Diana Evans.
Publisher/publication date: Vintage books/ 2006
ISBN:978-0-099-47904-8
I love the title. Simple. Enthralling. I first knew of this book when there was a book fair in my school in 2015. I’d gone to Trenchard hall where the book fair held, with my friend. At a certain stall, I picked this book up, glanced at it and snapped it. I didn’t have enough money to purchase it. I simply judged the book by its cover and was impressed (books still get judged by their cover. Forget that English idiom).
Twice, I started reading this book and twice, I dropped it. It was incomprehensible. A world of twin jargon involving Gladstone, hamster, beanbag.
In other words, the book demands your attention. You don’t go in casually. You ask, seek, knock.
The Hunters live in no 26a, Waifer avenue, Neasden. The mother is a Nigerian who constantly battles homesickness and puts cayenne pepper on her Yorkshire pudding. When depressed, she goes into the bathroom for hours, having mental conversation with her mother in an Edo village in Nigeria.
The father, Aubrey, works hard to satisfy the family and on certain nights, he changes character.
The children are older sister Bel, the twins; Georgia and Bessi, and baby sister Kemy who desperately longs to belong to the twins’ inner circle.
It’s a coming of age tale of the twins. 
The book deals with togetherness and separation. Togetherness of a family unit and separation of it. Togetherness of twins and separation.

“and this: Oneness in twoness in oneness- for ever. But how?”

This book touches on identity, culture and roots. Aubrey’s stay in Nigeria is horrible for him and Ida’s stay in England, horrible for her. It questions how far a person’s tradition goes with them. 

 “Ida had retreated back into her dressing gown as the Sekon Sun had faded. For her, home was not homeless; it was one place, one tree, one heat. She made herself a bubble and It was called Nigeria-without-Aubrey. Her children were allowed inside, Bel on her right, Kemy always on her lap where the lastborn never left, and the twins a little way off, in a bubble of their own. At dinner, Ida sometimes said “pass the salt” in Edo and Aubrey would stab something on his plate; or in the early mornings, she said, ‘at home now, they’re singing.’ She held Edo lessons in Bel’s room on Saturdays, because language was loyalty and Ida was not pleased when Aubrey told her to stop. ‘We’re in England now,’ he said ‘the girls don’t need Nigerian here. They’ll forget It soon enough’…”

It also touches on sexual assault and its reverberating effect; On peer pressure and the loss of innocence; On depression and its every fibre, even the thought of purchasing milk.
One thing that makes this book quite difficult at its end, is that it deals with loss. And no study on loss is ever easy. Loss, is never easy.
It’s reflective of the separation that comes to ties that were meant to bind forever.
Inspite of its solemn theme, lots of pages in the book are exhilarating. I was taken on a ride to Neasden. I understand “it’s good, eve”, “the Apple tree”, “Bessi’s best bed”, “mr hyde”.
I certainly won’t be able to share the good excerpts without revealing too much. We’ll make do with this:

“It was foreign to them, living like this, coming across each other in the playground the way others did, as if they were the same as them, the twinless ones. It felt to them like being halved and doubled at the same time.” 
“Neasden was easier. A little hilly place next to a river and a motorway with nodding trees and one stubby rows of shops. One bank, one library, one optician, one chemist, one chip-chop, one Chinese takeaway, pub, hairdresser, off-licence, cash ‘n’ carry, green grocer and two newsagents, a full stop at each end of Neasden lane”
“It could be the sound of the youngest screaming . Or it could be the sight of the oldest hurt, that makes a woman lose completely the order of things, the sense of past and future and what if, what would happen if.”

It’s a good piece of literature. Diana Evans has a sharp eye that I commend. All the details about Nigeria are credible.

“Very enjoyable, Evans writes with tremendous verve and dash. Her ear for dialogue is superb, and she has wit and sharp perception…a constantly readable book filled with likeable characters; a study of loss that has great heart and humour”
-Independent

I’ll love to have some discussion with someone who has read this book. I judge this to be art because it provokes something that was previously resting.
What are your thoughts? Are you interested in reading this? Have you read this? What can you judge from this review?

Me before you–BOOK REVIEW

Book Reviews 9 Comments


The title of the book is “Me Before  You”  and the author is Jojo Moyes.
The publisher is the Penguin group. This is the first edition and it has 481 pages. It was published in 2012.
I didn’t ponder on what the title could suggest before reading the book. In hindsight, I believe it implies what extent you’ll go to, in putting the happiness of the person you love before your happiness.
The genre is conntemporary adult fiction.
The book is written in the first person point of view, which is okay. Towards the end of the book, we however get two other points of view for a bit.
I can logically follow the main thread of the book but maybe not emotionally.
This book stirs up mixed feelings for me. It’s disturbing, not in the way ” the girl on the train” was disturbing. It’s disturbing in an okay-easy-to-read-but-i-can’t-accept-this-worldview kind of way.
Will Traynor is disabled, not just a paraplegic but he is a quadriplegic (and the worst case, a c5/6 as we’re informed). He can’t make use of his body from his chest downwards. There is faint movement in his palm but he can’t grasp anything. So he must be fed food, he must be given a drink. He has go to toilet in a catheter attached to his wheel chair, and have it emptied by a carer. He cannot make many decisions on his own. He is liable to having his mother(or anyone which is really my point) walk out on him during a conversation, as she did when he first brought up a topic she considered an outright taboo. This same taboo founds the main conflict in the book.
He is a 35years old man and has to depend on people. This is vastly dissimilar to his old way of life which included bungee jumping, swimming with whales, climbing mountains etc. He was a physical person and that life was ripped right out of reach.
Lou, on the other hand, is content , too content with her life, and it has made her not so smart. At 26years old, she talks and reasons quite slowly. She is the sort of person who counts the footsteps between her house and the bus stop. The kind of person who works at a bakery (butter-bun: her former work place), by just strolling in to the place on the basis of a dare from her younger sister that she couldn’t get employed in a day, and asks if she could work there. She is the kind of person who works there for 6years without a formal employment and without a demand on her part for a raise. All this, not because she is disabled in any way. She is the kind of person who stays in an unstimulating relationship for 7 years with a man who loves keeping his body fit more than he loves her. She has weird fashion sense which causes everyone she meets to raise their eyebrows.
Lou has a strange family too. Strange. Especially her grandpa. Ooh and her father. And her mother. And her sister. And her nephew-Tomotomo. ?
She gets employed as Will Traynor’s carer and inspite of the initial animosity, they ride on smoothly for close to six months.
The changes she is willing to effect in her life are still disturbing because they are as a function of her love for him not because she has seen the folly in her former decisions.
The novels begs the question, “is love sufficient?”
I do not have a favourite character in this book and I wish I could change the beginning and middle of the book to be better paced and gripping.
The style of the book is informal. The language is clear and convincing. It exposes the reader to the life of a disabled person and evokes empathy.
I don’t intend to insert spoilers so I won’t  go on.
I didn’t particularly like the ‘force’ of the book which was low. It wasn’t much of a page-turning, gripping book. It didn’t evoke a plethora of emotions from me, only one emotion. Notwithstanding, there was good humour in a number of scenes.
A novel is always beyond the story it tells, it’s the sum total of the author’s  voice, techniques etc.
I rate it a 3.5 out of 5 stars and recommend it to anyone interested. You should actually get it.
On living with disability:

“and all I can say to you is that, I wouldn’t be in his shoes for all the money in the world”

On love and choices:

“how is it you have the right to destroy my life ” I wanted to demand of him, “and I am not allowed a say in yours?”

on the gift of quietness and bliss:

“sometimes I stood at the window and watched him, his head tilted back, just enjoying the sun on his face. When I remarked on his ability to be still and just enjoy the moment-something I never mastered- he pointed out that if you can’t move your arms and legs, you haven’t got much of a choice”

On living life:

“there is a hunger in you Clark. A fearlessness. You just buried it, like most people do”
“just live well. Just live”
“I will never ever regret the things that I’ve done because most days, all you have left are places in your memory that you can go to”
“there’s not a lot separating me from anyone you might pass in the street. You probably wouldn’t look at me twice. An ordinary girl leading an ordinary life. Actually it suited me fine”
“”you cut yourself off from all sorts of experiences because you tell yourself you are not that sort of person”. ”
” but I’m not”


I got this book as a gift from someone I do not know personally although I read her blog. It was on instagram, she put up a picture of the book and for the first time in my life I commented with “I want someone to give me this book” and she did! It landed at my doorstep in UI. This is another thank-you note. to Eclectictope.com. :)?

Books, living and choices,
Debby