The Sky Isn't Visible from Here: Scenes from a Life Review

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The Sky Isn't Visible from Here: Scenes from a Life Review"The Sky Isn't Visible from Here: Scenes from a Life" is a particularly apt title. Felicia Sullivan uses scenes from her childhood mixed together with chapters that follow her adult life through her addiction and into her recovery. In doing so, the book gains depth, as we know some of the "why" behind Felicia's troubles and addiction. We also see her incredible honesty as she bares her life and soul to the readers, displaying to the world her own wrongs and embarrassing times, which many people would bury. Felicia gives us a window into her world, and then pulls us through the window as we are caught between the memories and her current life.
Felicia worked hard to separate herself from her mother (at the time the book was written, she hadn't been in contact for in 11 years), and at first I couldn't grasp why she became an addict. My thoughts are mirrored in the discussions between Felicia and her friends as she is struggling with her own addictions. Felicia is determined not to become like her mother, but the cocaine calls to her:
"you wonder how it is you got to this point. Because you told yourself in your bathroom that first time in December ... with two rolled bills and neatly cut lines that you'd never be an addict like your mother because you survived the war that was her, because you convinced yourself you were stronger than she was. And then, there go the lines."
Felicia follows this quote a page later with a description of her feelings about cocaine. First, she describes it for her friend, and then she completes the description for the reader:
"'It's like Broadway up my nose,' I say.
What I fail to tell Emily is how many times I've tried it since. And although I savored my first glass of red wine and the many that followed, cocaine is different. I like -- no, I love cocaine. I tolerate the nausea, the constant swallowing, the teeth grinding -- anything for that rush when the world seems simple, beautiful, and large enough to fit me in."
When she is on cocaine, Felicia is able to escape "the awkward, stammering girl who never feels smart enough, white enough, pretty enough." After struggling to fit in as a child, first alcohol and then cocaine give her the confidence to change her self-image. The change between shy, bullied child and self-confident writer and executive is so well written and well examed that the reader can truly grasp the impact addiction can have. If you are suddenly feeling a sense of self-worth, how do you give that up?
Felicia bares her soul, giving us a good long look at her life. She chronicles her own fight with addiction and mixes in childhood memories. The Sky Isn't Visible from Here is not an easy read by any means - Felicia's childhood experiences were not like those of the children of addicts I knew, well-fed and sheltered in the suburbs. These are vignettes of a year eating only potatoes, of shielding her eyes so she wouldn't see cockroaches scurrying in the floor in front of her, of seeing her friend's mother unconscious for 36 hours, and of taking her mother to the Emergency Room over and over. I have never read a book that pulled me so far into the real world of addiction; Felicia uses such intense detail when recounting the horrors she survived that I feel as if I was walking in her shoes beside her.
While Felicia has cut off contact with her mother, The Sky Isn't Visible from Here isn't a psychobabble "blame the mother for everything" book. It's an intense look into the dark world of addiction. Readers will walk away from this book with a much deeper understanding of what it is like to be caught in the life of an addict, or caught in an addiction. I highly recommend The Sky Isn't Visible from Here, to everyone, but especially for anyone who knows addicts or those recovering from addiction.The Sky Isn't Visible from Here: Scenes from a Life Overview

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Gifted: A Novel Review

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Gifted: A Novel ReviewFifteen minutes ago I finished 'Gifted' and want to present a different account than most of the reviews here. I won't recap the plot about young Rumi, her critically insensitive (but loving) father, and her sad and rather bewildered mother, as many people have offered the main points. My own central point is this: Agreed, the novel isn't perfect; but, parts of it are. Lalwani is so attuned to, and articulately expressive of, the emotions felt in a family (even an atypically dysfunctional family) that the book is engaging. It represents in acutely painful terms the nightmare of emotionally missing each other that most of us experience in our families --but for us, it's a flash of a moment here and there, whereas for Rumi it's extenuated and expanded into a continuous reality. I did care about Rumi, as I read.
A previous reviewer complained that none of the characters communicated - well, right! This is Lalwani's desire, to make us look at what happens to a bright, open, unusual child who is forced to play out a parent's impossibly rigid vision for her, week after week and year after year. Rumi feels unknown and unseen, and she is. I found a lot of the negative comments to be about a focus on the trees (details), instead of the forest (overall book). Yes, the family walks to the cinema and returns by 'car'. Perhaps a taxi? Is this really a problem worth noting? Consider instead a passage Lalwani includes in this very section of the book. As the family walks along, Rumi, at this point a pre-teen, experiences some rare light-hearted, in-sync moments with her parents. Everyone highly anticipates some fun together. But then the mother becomes tense about an exchange with her husband, and the world tilts: "She [the mother] laughed, a bitter rind to the sound. Rumi held her breath in her chest and looked at Mahesh [her father], fearful that it was all going to come tumbling down, that they would now sit in the cinema in silence, Shreene's [her mother's] mouth curdled with irritation, immersed in a cycle of resentment that there was no way to break. If this was the beginning of one of Shreene's moods it would start with the silent treatment, her mother possibly abstaining from food and drink not only in the cinema but until Maresh said sorry (which, from experience, could be very late at night or even, terrifyingly, the next day). Rumi's mind juddered." How beautifully does this passage capture the anxiety felt by a young girl who gets far too little joy and fears that her current experience of it is about to evaporate forever. There are many such passages in the book. Give it a chance.Gifted: A Novel Overview

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Through Eyes Like Mine Review

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Through Eyes Like Mine ReviewThe quiet power of Noriko Nakada's childhood memoir, Through Eyes Like Mine, is rooted in the author's spare, graceful prose. Nakada's is the rare memoir that captures the reader through careful observations and a minimal, yet absorbing present-tense child voice.
The story opens with an image of moonlit frost on junipers on the night of Noriko's birth. Her Japanese-American father and her German-Irish mother live in Bend, Oregon, where Nori grows up with her older brother and sister, all of whom look different than everyone in the small town. When Nori is five, the Nakada's differences are highlighted by the arrival of Mitch, a six-year-old boy they adopt from Korea, who comes kicking and screaming into a family of strangers.
There is much that goes unspoken in Nori's home, and much that she is left to make meaning of on her own. Silences settle like snow in young Nori's world, masking the darker contours below. In Through Eyes Like Mine, Nakada creates a kaleidoscope of arresting images that transport readers of any age back to the mysteries of childhood and the enduring struggle to find one's place.Through Eyes Like Mine OverviewThrough Eyes Like mine is the story of a childhood told through the present-tense voice of Nori Nakada. Born to a Japanese American father and German-Irish mother in rural Oregon, Nori's family becomes increasingly diverse when they adopt a six-year-old boy from Korea. She struggles to find comfort within a family, a community and a world that is both simple and complex.By examining her family's silences, she begins to understand life, death and her own identity.The joys and challenges of growing up invite the reader to recall the world through eyes like mine.

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Toast Review

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Toast ReviewFood writer Nigel Slater is a man after my own heart, as he, like me, relates episodes of his childhood, through the food he ate at the time. I am not familiar with many of the foods he references since they are Brit-specific, for example, oddities such as grilled grapefruit, space dust, angel delight, cheese-and-onion crisps, arctic roll, and heinz tinned puddings. At the same time, I feel his descriptions are so illustrative that it is easy to sense what these concoctions taste like. He also captures the ambivalent feelings consumers had in the 1950's and 60's about accepting modern convenience foods, especially with his mother's culinary pride and his own fastidious palette on the line. Even more personally, Slater shows how he used food as an emotional substitute for a mother who died early and a distant father, who vented his frustration through abuse and ultimately remarried the family cleaning lady as if to destroy the family nucleus intentionally. However, the author does not dwell on the emotional impact of these events but rather uses his edible memories as the catharsis to which we could all relate.
The author can be a cipher as he is hesitant to incur the risk of sharing too much of his personal history. The wider significance of the people in his life is never explained, and as a reader, I don't miss this dimension since Slater is so engaging in his narrative, the focus of which is almost entirely on himself - through breakfasts, lunches and dinners. He is full of hilarious anecdotes such as his overachieving stepmother who sounds like she would put Martha Stewart to shame or taking nightly walks with the dog and a candy bar to observe couples making out in the back of cars. Slater eventually finds a substitute family working after school in the kitchen of a hotel restaurant, and he describes the mundane tasks as if they are pioneering adventures, whether it amounts to preparing prawns for a cocktail or defrosting ready-made meals. The timeline of his story is thankfully limited. It begins with burnt toast and ends as the author, just out of school, finds employment in a restaurant in London. Slater converts the recollections in between into precise sensory memories that attain emotional resonance. This is not sentimental writing by any means, as he evokes time, people and place with a palpable realism in his energetic prose. Like Ruth Reichl and Anthony Boudrain, Slater makes his own idiosyncratic exercise in culinary history a winning childhood memoir.Toast Overview

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