Pregnancy Sucks for Men: What to do when your miracle makes you BOTH miserable, by Jeff Kimes

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I can officially say that I am a good husband. Yes, I can stand in line with the great ones. What’s more is that I didn’t have to risk my life to earn this prestigious and rare title. There were no heroic efforts or feats of derring-do. You see, I did exactly what I supposed to do; I read a book about my wife’s pregnancy while she was pregnant.

The book I read was Pregnancy Sucks: For Men. It was a great read and I loved it. Here’s why:

It was no easy to task to find a pregnancy book I could relate to. There are literally bookshelves, libraries even, filled with pages and pages of text written about birth and delivery. There are sections in bookstores containing mountains of books about pregnancy and for every one hundred of the books intended for girls only, there is one book marketed for guys. Most of them are terribly-written and offer little practical information. In fact, at this point in time most are out-of-date.

Pregnancy Sucks: For Men is not like this at all.

I found it in Barnes and Noble one day after deciding I was going to be a good and faithful husband by reading a book about pregnancy. Or, I probably realized that I was about to walk into a hornet’s nest of a situation and wanted evidence to remind Jacki of what a great husband I was as the due date inched closer and the hormones quickly spun out of control. I picked up the book and started reading. In place of the cold, dry information found in most of the books, there is a distinct and discernible voice behind the letters and words. When reading this book, it almost feels like my dad or best friend is telling me things I need to know and things for which I need to be prepared.

I read a few pages, closed the book so I wouldn’t ruin it, walked over the cash register and purchased it.

As I started to read, I noticed the book is conversational and isn’t afraid to say things it probably shouldn’t at times. In fact, I wonder how many times the author found himself in the doghouse after his wife realized he revealed more than he was supposed to reveal about her pregnancy. The stories were entertaining and, most of the time, I was able to empathize with what the author went through.

That seems to be the single biggest reason why I loved this book. Everything about it  seemed to echo my own experiences thus far as the husband of a pregnant woman. There is a sense of being coached by a friend who’s been through it before. I loved that.

The book itself is broken up smartly into different chapters that reflect each stage of the baby-making process: conception, months 1-9 and one chapter dedicated to after the baby is born. The chapters lined up PERFECTLY with what was happening in my life and my wife’s pregnancy. I read a chapter every month and used the book as a guidebook/preparation manual for the craziness that was about to unfold. I probably could have read it all in one afternoon, but I figured I’d forget most of it if I didn’t spread out the reading over time.

There is great advice on cooking (which I’m terrible at), cleaning, and other “womanly” chores that I normally feel somewhat less than motivated to help Jacki with. The author breaks down, in easy-to-understand terms, what’s going on in your wife’s body and what you can do to help avoid a DEFCON 1 situation. It’s a fresh relief after being so clueless in the beginning of this pregnancy. Now, I feel like an expert!

Of course, for all the good things I loved about the book, there were a couple of things I didn’t like. They were mostly pet peeves. The author, at times, fell back on stereotypical sports metaphors. Also, because of the length, some things are only glossed over. This is both a blessing (doesn’t take long to read) and a curse (you don’t get the full information sometimes). And, there is surprisingly little out-of-date information, despite a 2004 publish date, but at times talk about video tapes and pay phones reminds you that the book is older than it seems.

Despite these nitpicks, I’d heartily recommend the book to anyone who asks. It’s funny, short and a great substitute for a friend who has gone through it all before.

To wrap it up, I think this book is, ultimately, for guys who don’t know what they’ve gotten themselves into. And, If you’ve got a pregnant wife, you should already know this means you.

**Note from Jacki: Awhile back, I reviewed Pregnancy Sucks, which was written by Joanne Kimes, Jeff’s wife.

The Book: The Doctor and the Diva, by Adrienne McDonnell

The Story: Sometimes I avoid certain historical fiction only because I feel like it tells the same story over and over.  This story, I have to say, was totally unique and unlike anything I had read before.

It is the early 1900’s and Erika (an opera singer looking to further her career) and her husband Peter have been trying to conceive since they got married.  A child really is all that Peter wants.  Erika is on-board, but as the story progresses, you  kind of start to see that she’d just as soon have a big opera career before she has a baby.

On a tip from Erika’s brother, they start to visit a fertility doctor, Dr. Ravell.  He’s had success helping couples get pregnant when they thought for sure that they could not.  He was practicing several cutting edge techniques, including invetro fertilization.  Who know that that that existed in the early 1900’s?  As the treatments progress,  Dr. Ravell discovers that Peter will never be able to have children but has found this out on the sly and doesn’t have the guts to tell the couple.  Here’s where he’s faced with a series of tough decisions.

All three of these characters, in fact, are faced with tough decisions.  They are these complicated people who are all just trying to do what is right, even when those things seem to counteract each other at every turn.

What I Thought: I kind of thought that this book was amazing.  I know that you guys know this about me, but nothing makes a book for me like good character development, and that was just incredible here.  Erika kind of goes from this meek, annoying starlet wanna-be to this real woman with real emotions going through a seriously tough situation.  I couldn’t help but put myself in her place.  The decision to have children and put aside all these dreams that you had for your life had to have been so hard and the author fleshes all that out perfectly.  Her struggles, her talent, her needs, they are all just laid out there and the reader is left to make the decision: is she seriously selfish or is she just doing what she thinks is right?

Same with Peter.  At first, he just seems like this controlling, obsessed husband, but as the book goes on you start to see his real heart: he is genuinely madly in love with his wife and just wants a family with her.  He makes some decisions that made me cringe, but even then, was he just doing what was right by his family?

For me, though, the most interesting character was Dr Ravell.  The author somehow takes this creeper of a doctor and turns him into a character that you just want to hug.  His skill at his job combined with his pure old loneliness made for a pretty bad combination for him as far as life decisions go.  Women were falling over themselves for him and he was lonely…. the choices he made may not have been the “right” ones, but the author made his loneliness so palpable that his sleeping with these random women seem alright and even good.  Watching him change and fight these deep battles within himself was probably my favorite part of this book.

Historical fiction is a totally tricky genre I think.  It can get so cheesy so fast.  From the author’s notes at the beginning and the end of the book, she put some serious research into these characters, even basing Erika on someone in her family tree.  As far as I can tell, this is her first novel and I have to say, I was totally impressed.  I’ll keep an eye on her and not hesitate for a minute to read her next novel.

Conclusion: I would recommend this without reservation to anyone except people that are currently struggling with infertility or have recently experienced a miscarriage.  I don’t want to spoil anything, but there are some pretty graphic scenes here and they made the pregnant lady in me cringe and cry a little bit.  Other than that, seriously good stuff.  Check it out.

The Book: Eye Contact, by Cammie McGovern

The Story: In a small patch of woods outside of an elementary school, a young girl is murdered.  The only witness to the murder is Adam, a nine-year-old autistic boy.  Even on a good day, he is almost completely non-verbal, but after this, he totally shuts down.

His mom, Cara, has always been drawn to people who are broken or need fixed.  She has worked endlessly with Adam and can read his non-verbal clues like a book.  She has his mannerisms and routine down to a science.  Using this knowledge, she starts investigating why Adam (a rule follower to the max) would have been in the woods, and what could have caused the responses that he had.  This investigation takes her back to her past to her relationship with Adam’s father and her best friend at the time.  This untying of the past actually becomes pretty important as the book goes on.

There’s a lot of other stuff going on here: police officers with other motives, a middle-school boy who casts himself as a junior detective, over-bearing parents, and a lot of issues about dealing with special needs within the education system.

This book starts off strong, builds up the pressure, then offers twists everywhere until you can’t see which way is up.  I’m not going to ruin this for you, but the ending is wiiiild.

What I Thought: A lot of times, after I read a book, I’ll go to goodreads.com and read a few reviews just to see what other people think.  One of the reviewers said that this book seemed like a cross between I Promise Not to Tell and The Curious Incident of the Dog at Midnight. I think that is an incredibly fair assessment.  If you end up reading this and liking it, pick up these other two.  Peas in a pod.

I thought that the first part of this book was totally intriguing.  The mystery was part of that, of course, but really the family at the center was the biggest intrigue.  Would Adam come out of his box to tell who did this, would Cara be able to figure it out or get Adam to talk?  How would the police and the school administration treat this gentle kid involved in a really horrid killing?  All these questions are what kept me reading late into the night one night.

I have to admit to a little bit of disappointment in where this ended up going.  I felt like there were way to many characters introduced to be supported by a little 250 page book.  The ex-boyfriend, his crazy mom, the ex-best friend, her brother,  the middle school boy, his mom, his friends, the special ed teacher, the middle school bullies…. I could go on and on and on.  These characters all had interesting stories, but it was all just a little too much.  The author didn’t give me time to truly get involved in these characters so they just seemed kind of trivial.

To be fair, the twists at the end were pretty much crazy and at several different times I thought I had it figured out, only to be totally blown away with just how wrong I’d been.  I like a mystery that does that.  So, there ya go.

Conclusion: If you like a quick little mystery between heavier books, try this one out.  Probably a book that I’ll forget about in the next couple of months, but it was a good distraction for a couple of days. Like I said earlier, I think if you liked Curious Incident of the Dog at Midnight, that you will probably get into this one too.  It’s worth a shot.

The Book: The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid: Travels Through my Childhood, by Bill Bryson

The Story: Although he is known for his travel memoirs, Bill Bryson decided to take us on a trip through his childhood in this one.

Bill Bryson grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s in the midwest.  He is nostalgic and sweet about little things: comic books, color tv, escalators, the onset of prepackaged food, lincoln logs, stuff like that, and about big things: the space race, the evolution of the suburbs, education, baseball*.

He combines his personal memories with data and facts about what was going on through this period to give a good solid look at 20 years of America’s past.

What I Thought: I’ve had a thing for Bill Bryson for a long time.  I was so excited when my mom passed this on to me after reading it that I’m pretty sure I actually squealed.  So frigging good.

I cannot even tell you how many times I was laying on the couch reading and laughing loud enough that Shaun would make me read the part to him.  I really couldn’t help it. I had to set it down a few times because I was laughing so hard.  Usually this happened when people got hurt or embarrassed.  You’ll be happy to know that both of these things happen a lot.

I think the thing that sets this apart and makes it really good is not the humor even though it was really funny. It’s the charm.  I’m young and still get a little nostalgic when I look back on my childhood.  Reading a good writer flesh this out is charming and sweet.  The innocence of his childhood and his love for that time in his life and his family and friends just comes through the pages and for me it was really touching.

There are quite a few racist and sexist bits mixed in, but generally he admitted right off that he was about to be a little bit racist or sexist.  Not sure if that makes it better, but it didn’t detract from the book for me. I just felt like that was how he was raised and if the rest of the book can be filtered through a lens of “childhood,” these bits probably should be too.

Conclusion: I’m not sure how many baby boomers I have reading my blog, but if you’re one of them: get this book right now.  So good.  Even if you aren’t a baby  boomer, there is really good stuff here. You’ll love it. Go get it. This probably isn’t his best work, but I think it’s worth the read, without a doubt.

*This is the worst constructed sentence I’ve ever written. Maybe it is the worst constructed sentence I’ve ever seen.  After I wrote it, I reread and realized how truly awful it was, but just wanted you to be able to enjoy it like I did.  You’re welcome.

The Book: A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick

The Story: It’s early-ish 1900’s and Ralph Truitt puts an ad in the paper looking for a reliable wife.  He gets a lot of answers, but one of them really strikes him.  Through letters and pictures, he and Catherine Land decide to get married.  We meet both of them while Catherine is traveling to meet Ralph for the first time.

It doesn’t take very long to realize that Catherine has something a little bit more sinister on her mind than marriage.  We also learn that she has a past that, for some reason, she is going to extreme measures to hide.

When Ralph is severely injured on their journey home, things kind of go askew.  Instead of getting to know her future husband, Catherine is put in charge of nursing him back to health.  As he recovers, they do have a chance to get to know each other and they both realize that this is not really what they were expecting.

Ralph’s first wife had died 20 years ago and around the same time, his young son ran away from home.  Before he will agree to marry Catherine, he puts her in charge of bringing his son back to him.  This starts a twisty, crazy plot that I’m not going to ruin for you!

What I Thought: I don’t really know how to rate this one.  It was alright.  I thought that the story had some real drive and from the first few pages I was intrigued.  The first few mentions of poison and murder that Catherine made got me all excited.  The copy that I got of this book didn’t have a plot outline on the back, just some blurbs.  I had no idea that this was going to be a dark book, I thought it was just going to be about these two people meeting and loving or hating each other or whatever.  Murder is much more exciting, right? Right.

But something went wrong in the execution.  I think that what killed it for me was the excessive focus on sex.  It seemed like every single character was totally obsessed.  At first, I thought it was just Ralph and that it was a serious character flaw, then I realized that it was the author.  Meh.  I don’t mind a couple steamy sex scenes, but these just got out of hand. It just ended up being totally repetitious and boring.

The same can be said for the story, I guess.  The first twist I was pretty surprised, but then the whole book started repeating itself over and over.  Eventually I was just skimming along and kinda rolling my eyes.

I think that what was missing was heart.  There were all these different relationships and back stories and issues that could get super, super emotional.  I didn’t feel an emotion after about the first 10 pages.  Nothing.  There was nothing here that was stirring and there really should have been.  The story itself had some intrigue and merit, but the lack of any connection to characters or plot or anything solid just really diminished all of the positives.

Conclusion: If you’re a screenwriter, a producer, whatever- read this book and make it into a movie.  I think that this could be one of those rare circumstances where the movie would be better than the book.  There’s a lot to work with here, but just not really done well.  I wouldn’t recommend reading this, but if the movie comes out, I’ll make plans to see it!

The Book: The Preservationist, by David Maine

The Story: You know this one, I’m sure.  Noah builds a boat.  Noah gets the animals in two-by-two.  Big flood comes and washes everything away.  Noah & his family are the only survivors. They re-populate the Earth. There ya go.

This book bounces from perspective to perspective:  Noah, his wife, his sons, and his daughters-in-law and we get to experience the flood in all these different lights.  We get to see them argue and bicker and help each other out and work their butts off.  What you get, in the end, is a more complete look at what it may have looked like to live for months in cramped quarters with thousands of animals and your family members while this giant historical event is happening right outside your window.

What I Thought: I haven’t read too many re-tellings of Biblical stories just because I generally get annoyed at the agenda that Christian Fiction tries to push.  I did read Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve and really loved it.  I loved the new, fresh perspective, the humor, and the way he relied on the Bible but also added his own bit of humanity to the story.

I can say the exact same thing for this book.  I cannot tell you how impressed I was.  David Maine didn’t take off on this “God faked us out, Noah is a crazy dude” tangent, nor did he get all pompous and preachy.  The tone that he struck was pretty much perfect for the events that were happening and it just made these characters seem very real.

This could have been written as this long, dense, heavy book but it’s really not.  It was super short- maybe 250 pages or so- and I finished it in just a few hours of reading.  It was light and easy to read.  I would almost recommend it as bedtime reading to my friends who have middle-school age kids, but there’s far too much “rutting” going on here for that.  Meh. Oh well. I’ll recommend to the parents instead.

Conclusion: Give this one a go.  It’s a quick little read that kind of fleshes out a story that everyone has heard but maybe not put a lot of thought into.  I guarantee that it will make you laugh a little and reconsider how these events actually took place.  Fun, fun.

The Book: Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts, by Julian Rubinstein

The Story: This is the story of Attila Ambrus a guy who snuck into Hungary in the 1990’s and kind of stumbled into a job as a professional ice hockey player.  Because he was not great at hockey, he ended up just being the janitor at times and not having enough money to get by.  He decided, on a whim, to take up another profession:  robbing banks and post offices.  At first he is just kinda running in, demanding money and hoping for the best.  Eventually he gets pretty good and becomes kind of this icon of prosperity and people love him.  Somewhere in there, he also manages to have some girlfriends and smuggle pelts from Transylvania.  I’m not even kidding.

Did I mention that this is non-fiction?

What I Thought: The first hundred or so pages of this were really hard for me.  It even made me get whiney because I really did want it to be good.  I couldn’t really get a good feel for the characters and I was kind of bored with the plot.

Or maybe I was just in a cranky mood, because once this picked up for me, I fell totally in love.  I got into Attila’s antics and even though he was robbing banks, I really really wanted him to keep doing well.  I cracked up as he got totally hammered and went in to rob banks and I was rooting for him with these crazy women that he kept dating.  That connection to Attila was, for me, the highlight of the book.  I’m not sure if the author got to do a lot of interviews with Attila or what, but he really managed to capture a real person and it made this book so enjoyable.

I had to remind myself half a million times that this is a true story.  I don’t want to give anything away, but some of the things that happen seriously made my jaw drop.   The level of police corruption and incompetence that allowed Attila to continue his robbing as long as he could became hilarious at a point and was almost more unbelievable than the stunts that Attila was pulling.

Conclusion: A fun non-fiction book that reads more like a novel.  Kind of a “man book” in how it is written, but really does keep your attention. A fun read that you can pass off to your husband knowing that he’ll like it too.

The Book: One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd, by Jim Fergus

The Story: I guess that when the government was trying to “figure it all out” with the Native Americans, they had a big get together where they were discussing what could be done to foster peace between the two groups.  One of the Cherokee Indian groups said that in their culture, whatever tribe the mother is a part of is the tribe that the children belongs to.  They suggested that, in exchange for a thousand horses, that the government get together one thousand women to be the Indians’ wives and their children would be this generation that would make peace between the groups possible.  In reality, the government was totally appalled and ended the peace talks.  Jim Fergus took this little piece of info and played a little game of “what if?”… what if the government would have rounded up one thousand women and handed them over to the Indian tribe?  That is the basis of this book.

The book centers around the life of May Dodd, a woman who was in a mental institute for “promiscuity” because she lived with and had children with a man that she was not married to.  Instead of living the rest of her life in this horrible institute, she decided to take this get-out-of-the-mental-institute-free card and become an Indian’s wife.  Eek.  This is written like her journal of that time period, also including letter that she wrote back home.

What I Thought: I’ve been noticing more and more books that don’t have a plot outline or anything on the back of them, just little blurbs.   I got two books at the used bookstore this past week and both of them just have blurbs on the back. That’s all this one has too. I probably never would have bought this book had there bee an outline on the back, so I guess that it worked out well for them this time around. I have never really been into stories about Native Americans. I have no idea why.  Even in elementary school, when we had to read books about Native Americans, I would get annoyed.  I think it’s a fascinating subject and don’t mind non-fiction about it, but for some reason fiction books about Native Americans get on my nerves.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t like this book, but I’m pretty sure that it had nothing to do with it being about Native Americans. In fact, I kind of thought that the little tidbits of fact that were offered up were interesting and that the Indian characters were the best in the book.

I just hated Mary Dodd.  She was the main character and she was totally unlikeable.  She was full of herself and unwilling to bend or change and just kind of annoying.  She lacks any kind of emotional depth.  The other American women who were with her were just straight up cliches and even the ones that I ‘liked’ kind of made me roll my eyes.

I also hated her journal.  I don’t mind this “style” of writing- in letters and journals- if it is done well.  This wasn’t done well.  The voice was absolutely nothing like you would expect from a woman in the 1870’s (while pregnant, she describes herself as ‘as big as a house’…. really?!) and it was beyond obvious that it was written by a man.  The only time this works is when it is convincing, and this was not. I do want to add that the ‘big as a house’ bit wasn’t the only anachronism, just the one that came to mind first.  This bad boy was chock full of them.  If you want to read a well done version of the historical-fiction-as-journal, check out Impatient with Desire.  That book has everything this book was missing.

I guess I’m coming down pretty hard on ol’ Jim Fergus, huh?   To his benefit, the story was fast paced and compelling.  It had an easy flow and it was broken up into ‘notebooks’ and into the individual journal entries so that really kept it moving a long.  I found myself skimming towards the middle, but at the end it really does pick up and the story starts to pack a lot of steam.  I think that had I cared what ultimately happened to May Dodd, I would have been at the edge of my seat.

Conclusion: Like I said earlier, if you want to read what this should have been, check out Impatient with Desire.  So good. This one? Meh. I feel perfectly comfortable telling you to skip it.

The Book: The Running Man, by Richard Bachman/Stephen King

The Story: The year is 2025 and everything is kind of in shambles.  Ben Richards’ young daughter has come down with the flu and because they can’t afford to take her to the doctor, it is just getting worse and worse.  America is pretty much obsessed with reality TV that is taken up a notch- people can get severely hurt or die, but also have the chance to win money for their families at a time when jobs and money are scarce.  Ben decides that this is the way to go for his family so he goes and applies to be part of the Games.

The Game he is chosen for is called Running Man.  It is the most popular show and has the highest payout, however no one has ever survived.  The object is this:  the player is let loose in America. He gets a 12 hour head start, then he is fair game.  There are a group of men looking for him and Americans are encouraged to call in any spotting of the player.  Any confirmed spotting wins 100 dollars and any spotting that leads to a kill is worth 1,000.  The player wins 100 dollars an hour that he stays alive and if he makes it 30 days, he gets a billion dollars.  He can go anywhere in the world but has to send in two tapes every day that the Network can show on TV and can potentially give out clues to where the player is.

Ben is just this cocky, kinda smart guy and he goes into this with his goal being to get enough money for his wife and daughter to be comfortable and for his daughter to be able to go to the hospital.  He is given advice early on not to just hole up, but to run, run, run.  This is advice that he takes to heart and makes the suspense and adventure happening here totally crazy.

What I Thought: I don’t know what took me so long to read this.  I have this book that has four of Stephen King’s stories that were originally published as Richard Bachman.  The other stories I’ve read a handful of times, but I’d always just avoided Running Man.  In an attempt to clear out my basket of books I haven’t read, I decided to read this one last night. I’m glad I finally gave it a go.

What I’ve always thought was funny about The Long Walk and what I thought was funny about this one too is how ahead-of-his-time Stephen King was on calling the rise of reality TV.  Shows like Survivor and Biggest Loser and all that stuff didn’t exist at all when these stories were written, but Stephen King seemed to know that they were coming.  Weird.

Anyway, I thought that this was just alright.  Not Stephen King’s finest hour, and not his worst.  Just somewhere in the middle.  I remember reading that he wrote this full story in 72 hours though.  That in and of itself is pretty impressive.

The part I liked the most was just the bleak look at the future that was presented.  It’s funny, as we’re getting closer to 2025 to see how far off he was about some things (flying cars?  Probably  not going to happen in the next 15 years) and how close he was on others (severe, horrible pollution).  I also really got into Ben Richards’ character and although I felt like everything was stacked against him, I wanted him so badly to beat the system.  All of the stuff I liked a lot was in the first half.

The second half, for me, was where everything got kind of messy and sub-par.  It turned into a full tilt action movie pretty much and I just wasn’t impressed.  It wasn’t awful, but it just didn’t pack a punch like the first half did.  After a few pages of car chases and shooting and yadda yadda, I found myself zoning out… and then it went on for 50 more pages.  I wasn’t impressed.  I did like how it ended and thought that it was fitting, but getting there was just kind of shaky.

Conclusion: Here is really what I wanted to say my whole review: If you liked The Hunger Games, check this out.  It’s only a couple hundred pages and I know you can fit it in before Mockingjay comes out in August.  It’s such a similar story and setting that it is kind of shocking.  It is just the more “grown up” version.

The Book: The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Story: The story begins with young newlyweds Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli who have just immigrated from India starting a new life in America.  They set up house in a suburb of Boston and go to school and just begin to get acclimated to American culture.  They are not married long when they have their first son, Gogol.  They name him after a Russian author that Ashoke admires while waiting for his “real” name to be sent from family in India.  The name never arrives and the boy is Gogol from then on.

The story follows Gogol through his childhood and adolescence, just trying to strike a balance between the very Indian life that his family leads at home and the life that he sees all around him in his friends homes.  As he grows older and starts going out on his own, he has to make some real decisions about who he is and how he will allow his culture to define him.  For Gogol, a lot of this comes back to the fact that he has a name that no one has ever heard from a country that is not even his own.  He never really feels “at home” in his name, and that is a large focus of the book at times.

The last half of the book is taken by Gogol’s relationships with women.  His family want him, obviously, to find an Indian girl that is part of their circle and marry in the traditional Indian way.  While he’s at school, however, Gogol dates several women who are far, far from that mold.  When his father passes away unexpectedly, he is once again immersed in the culture he grew up in and finds that he has to make a decision about how he is going to live the rest of his life.

What I Thought: For some reason I’ve read a lot of immigration stories over the last year.  I’m not really sure why I’m drawn to them, but I think it’s kind of fascinating to see America from an outsider’s perspective.

To be perfectly honest, as far as the feelings/emotions/observations part of the immigration story, Jhumpa Lahiri really added very little to the conversation.  Because her story covered such a long time period (1968 thru 1999) and covered the lives of two full generations, all in under 300 pages, there really wasn’t a deep look into the immigration experience and what it looks like specifically to Indians.  But as far as adding a beautifully written piece? She did her job.  The prose was simple and everything was pretty understated, but she pulled it off really well.  I was hooked in from page one and I know that the main reason for that is that her words and her flow were just delicious.

I think that where she went with Gogol was kind of beyond just the basic immigration story.  She really dove into the experience of finding out who you are separate from your parents, from your culture, and from the expectations people put on you.  Gogol was pushed from a lot of different directions, just like any American teenager, and it took him a lot of thought and a lot of character-changes to really lock into who he was and start living that.  That is not just an immigration story.  That is a universal coming of age story and I really think that that is why this book was so successful.

It says on the cover that Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer for her short story collection about similar topics, and you guys know how I feel about short stories.  I have a library trip planned for tonight and you better believe that this one is coming home with me!

Conclusion: While this kind of is just another immigration story, for me it was a lot more than that. It was beautifully written and I would recommend it to anyone.  Read this!