Currently reading
See You in the Cosmos
Exploring Space: From Galileo to the Mars Rover and Beyond
The Terranauts: A Novel
A Quiet Kind of Thunder
Gumnut Babies
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42/264 pages
Highly Illogical Behaviour
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82/249 pages
Revenger
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75/425 pages
See What I Have Done
The Dog, Ray
Forgetting Foster
Thanks for the Trouble
Tommy Wallach and I discussed favourite birds, debated zombies, and perhaps discussed some of that book and music stuff over at 100% Rock Magazine!Actual Rating 3.5
Meet Parker Santé. He’s medium cute, bad at writing in third person, and good at stealing shit from rich people. He’s not the best person you’ll ever meet, he’s also not the worst.
He’s hanging out in a hotel lobby, waiting for something to steal, when he sees her. She’s about his age, pretty, has a large wad of cash, silver hair, and wears a look of perfect sadness on her face.I mean, some things are obviously shitty, and some things are obviously nice or noble or whatever, but between the two goalposts of black and white, between punching a baby in the kidney and donating a kidney to save a baby, there’s a freaking football field’s worth of gray area.
He doesn’t speak. Can’t speak. He sees a psychologist regularly and had one session with a speech therapist, but he just can’t make the words come out. He can’t even moan or make noise when he laughs. So he writes everything in a journal. He has 104 completed journals at home, like a record of where he’s been and thoughts he’s had.People usually use that word – “perfect” – to talk about good things; a perfect score on a test, or a perfect attendance record, or landing a perfect 1080. But I think it’s a way better word when it’s used to describe something – even a totally shitty something – that’s exactly the thing it’s supposed to be. Perfect morning breath. A perfect hangover. Perfect sadness.
Zelda tells him that she’s waiting for a call, and once it comes she’s going to give all her money to the next needy person she sees and jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. She doesn’t say this on a whim; she’s given it a lot of thought. She means to go through with it.I stopped talking after my dad died, I wrote, then prepared myself for the usual things people said after I told them that.
“What a remarkably asinine thing to do.”
This was not the usual things.
Thus begins his mission to teach her that there are so many things to live for, his mission to change her mind. But how can you convince someone who thinks they’ve lived for hundreds of years that they haven’t seen everything.There’s a word in Portuguese that my dad wrote about in one of his books: saudade. It’s the sadness you feel for something that isn’t gone yet, but will be. The sadness of lost causes. The sadness of being alive.
In trying to show her it’s worth going on living, he might just get caught up in it all and realise that he hasn’t really been living, either. And that maybe it’s time to start.
The rest of this review can be found HERE!