layawaydragon
Written on Oct 28, 2012
Update 10/17: I've received the book and will be reading it next. I will probably have a review up by the end of the week at latest.
Update Oct. 28:
As you can see it took me far longer than expected to get to this point, on page 265. The book isn't finished but I am. I'm done with trying to grapple with the long, convoluted nonsensical random rambling sentences. It took 11 days to read a measly two hundred and some pages, when I usually read a book a day. The simple act of trying to read, make sense of and follow this book is monstrous. I kept thinking, Why is this so much work?. Now there are books that are suppose to be challenging, that are suppose to be work and that are ultimately rewarding for such effort.
That's not this book.
There's nothing at the end of this rainbow to make reading this worth it. I hate pretty much everything about this book, except the package it came in. I mean the cover, the pages. The simple natural feeling and how well the book fit in my hand made me want to read a book packaged like this, but not this book.
I don't care about what happens when they find Cat. I find Will and Pen's bumper-sticker conversation annoying enough, adding Cat back to make the original Trio may make me want to kill myself. Funnily enough, that's how another character described their conversations and the Original Trio are very aware of how annoying they are to other people. Yet we're suppose to like them, like their conversations and give a rat's ass about them reuniting? Fuck no. Are we suppose to want and long for this kind of relationship while feeling the sadness of their break up? I sure as hell didn't feel anything like that. Their relationship just comes off as toxic and unhealthy to me.
I hate how Pen is stunted due to her dependence on people and her sheer determination to cling. I mean really? With her "cluck no"s, and her attitude of "you can't leave, you love me. If you leave that must mean you never loved me and I can't accept the fact that people change. Everything must stay the same" Pen seriously comes off like a 5 year old. Her child Augusta seems far more mature.
Now, Will I liked. I just hated him with Pen and feel bad that he's falling in love with her for some incomprehensible reason. He lived and grew and became a better person when The Trio broke up. Cat did too. Cat realized how dependent, how stunted and stuck The Trio was to them individually. Pen failed to do so.
While Jason came off as an immature frat boy jerk, I understood his hatred of The Trio.
I have tried to make it through. I gave it almost two weeks. I can't do it. It's like the soap opera version of Will & Grace. It is the reason I have 7 books to read and review and have no desire to read. I think this book might have killed that compulsion to finish books now matter what. I'm fearful of the next book being like Falling Together.
I'm going to take the day off from reading to readjust from this book and try delving into another book tomorrow.
For example, starting on page fucking one,
She [Pen] stood with her head tilted against the bookstore wall, her ears only half hearing a description of how to single-handedly lace oneself into a leather corset (“There's an implement involved,” she told Jaime later. “There always is,” he said.), her eyes only half seeing the otherwise love store's horrible ceiling, paste-gray and pocked as the moon, while the weary rest of her began to fold itself up and give into it's own weight like a bat at dawn.
That one sentence rambled and twisted into a paragraph, which included a description of a conversation, a conversation and two similes.
This story continues not with Pen in the bookstore, but with,
Yesterday, Pen's daughter, Augusta, had come home from school with a late spring cold, and Pen had recognized, her heart sinking, that they were in for a rocky ride. Augusta's sleep, disordered in the best of circumstances, could be tipped over the edge and into chaos by any little thing. To make matters worse, it was her first illness since Pen had purged their apartment of children's cold medicine following newly issued, scarily worded warnings that it might be harmful to kids under the age of six. When Jamie had come home at 2:00 A.M., he had found Augusta cocooned in a quilt on the sofa, wide awake, coughing nosily but decorously into the crook of her arm the way she had been taught to do at school, and a pale, wild-haired Pen staring into the medicine cabinet like a woman staring into the abyss.
I should have run away right here. Pen is just stupid for not using cough medicine. With two-hundred-sixty-four more pages written like this, it finally broke me. I read that much in broken tiny clumps of pages because it was so annoying, pointless and hard to follow.
This on page 243, sums up how I feel about both Jason, Will and Pen,Pen said to Will, “These seats are insane. I feel like a Poppin' Fresh roll, unpopped.”
“I fell like a jack-in-the-box,”said Will,”in the box.”
“Jesus freaking Christ, please tell me this isn't the way you guys always talk.”Jason, standing in the aisle next to Will: loud, looming, big as a barn, American flag T-shirt blazing. “Or I might have to change me mind about changing my seat, when the black dude in the sleep mask gets off at Vancouver.”
As Will and Pen looked over at him, the black dude on the other side of Augusta lifted his sleep mask, took a long look at Jason and told them, “Lucky you.”
Before that, Pen shows irony and lack of insight here on page 244 with Jason,“Did not,” he [Jason] said.
Listen to you, thought Pen, you are straight out of the clucking sandbox.
Of course, Pen did get the “clucking” thing from her mother and am guessing some of her other baggage comes from her as well.
Moving forward 10 pages and a day or so later in the book, Pen and Will have a conversation regarding Jason, over Jason.When the pause in the conversation started to become unbearable, Will nudged Pen encouragingly. She ignored it. He nudged her again. She kicked him.
“So. Uh. Jason,” said Will,” do you think she went to Cebu to be with Armando?”
“Oh, Will,” Pen exclaimed, flinching. “ 'Be with him'? God. Could you not do better than that?”
“Hey, it's not like you were asking.”
“Well, clearly, I should have.”
“And you would've phrased it how?” demanded Will. “'Visit him'? 'Spend time with him'? Come on, we all know a euphemism when we hear it.”
“All I'm saying is-”began Pen, but Jason raised his hand.
“Hello? I'm sitting right here,” he said.
They both stared at him.
Ten more pages and another day or so later in the book, I finally said Fuck this shit, it's not worth it.