Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction Review

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(More customer reviews)*****
This is a stunningly written, intense and emotional memoir of a father's struggle to deal with his brilliant, charismatic, and caring son's addiction to methamphetamine. It is honest and authentic and raw and heart-rending and fascinating. It is unforgettable. As I read, I felt many emotions for both the father and son---everything from anger to sadness to grief to fear. I felt as though I was right there on the emotional roller coaster with the author.
Even if you have no personal experience of a loved one's addiction, you will be moved by this father's struggle to cope with his son's substance abuse turmoils. Despite methamphetamine being this country's most problematic drug, many of us, including me, know very little about it, and may not initially feel too interested in finding out. However, the author's struggles and emotional journey are so poignant and compelling that any reader will find themselves caught up in this memoir, will benefit from what they learn and most of all, will be glad that they read it. If you know and/or love an addict, this book will be even more important---it will be vital---as you will find much to identify with and perhaps even be able to better process some of your own emotions.
Highly recommended.
*****


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The Brave: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)Nicholas Evans, best known for his bestselling "The Horse Whisperer," has a gift of creating believable characters and developing them over the course of a novel. He gives his prose and settings a masculine feel, while keeping the themes more feminine-friendly, focused on family and love and jilted relationships. It's a formula that's worked, though it was beginning to feel like, well . . . a formula.
In this latest effort, Evans varies his themes and structure, giving us his most ambitious work yet. It's aptly titled, since his approach is brave in its attempt to go into new territory on new trails. We start off with young Tommy as he deals with childhood, bed-wetting, and bullying at an English boarding school. I was thankful for this different direction, and found myself caught up in young Tommy's struggles. The prologue, though, clued me in to drama and violence to come. Sure enough, the story takes some turns within a few chapters, and less than a hundred pages in throws readers for a good twist. It works. But it also feels a bit pedantic, the way Evans spends pages going back to explain how it came to be.
Tommy ends up in Hollywood with his mother and step-father, part of the movie industry scene. He remains relatively unblemished by an era that is known to have been saturated in sexual and narcotic misadventures, but his mother is not so fortunate. The step-father becomes increasingly abusive, and his mother is pushed to make some fateful decisions (yes, this is where the typical Evans comes in). It's really no surprise when she ends up in the arms of, you guessed it, a man in Montana who has a gift with horses. Yawn.
More frustrating than this Evans cliche is his decision to alternate chapters between not only characters but time frames, with very little to reorient us each time the switch is made. We jump from Tommy's young life to his divorced adult life to his mother's teenage years to his own son's fate. Danny (the son) is facing a possible court-martial for his part in civilian deaths while working in the US military. This subplot was intriguing, but felt tacked on in the midst of the nostalgic and self-discovery bits. On a side note, I wish Evans' editors would fix a few British tendencies in the Americanized versions so that we don't have Americans such as Danny saying things that sound patently British.
All in all, Evans gives us interesting characters and settings, but I hope his next book will find a happy medium between the cliches and formulas and the disjointed structure of "The Brave."

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The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)Yes, Bezellia is a "poor little rich girl" but she's not the typical tragic princess you're thinking of. She's no hero, and that's why I like her so darn much. She's as imperfect as any other teenage girl and her world is just as narrow. And that's a good thing. It makes her real, makes her someone I can relate to. Bezellia is spunky but she's powerless to change her world, just as most of us feel. She loves the wrong boy at the wrong time--a white girl cannot be with a black boy in Bezellia's world. The issues of race are dealt with here with a lot of depth. I like that Gilmore doesn't sugar coat the discrimination of the 1960's South. But what I like even more is that Gilmore doesn't make her white characters into heroes, people too good to be real. They are just as flawed as the real people you know. For every good deed that is done, motives are questioned. For every reach across the racial gap, hearts are hurt as often as they are healed. Gilmore doesn't try to leave us with the impression that all is right with race in the South, even now. She keeps it real. She keeps it honest, as bitter as that pill may be to swallow. And she does it all in a rich, beautiful language that is a pleasure to read. There are several passages I read over and over because I loved the poetry in them. It's a great story told with the gravity the subject deserves.

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