Book Review: Gone, Gone, Gone

Gone, Gone, Gone
Author: Hannah Moskowitz
Published: 2012, Simon Pulse
Genre: Young Adult, 251 pages
Rating: 4.5/5

Sometimes I buy a book on recommendation from my friend, Kimberly, who\ always seems to know which books are on the market. Since I thoroughly enjoy reading both young adult novels and yaoi mangas she pointed out the novel Gone, Gone, Gone at our last trip to the bookstore. Impulse buy? Yes, indeed.

Craig is broken without his broken ex-boyfriend. He find comfort in his pets and avoids most people with the exception of Lio. Lio feels alive when he is with Craig. He survived cancer while his twin brother did not. As sniper shootings begin in the DC area where they live the two teenagers struggle to make sense of life and love shooting victims die. What is the pain and joy of living?

What I enjoyed most about Moskowitz writing was her style of narration. She allows her readers into the minds of her adolescent male characters as they process the world around them. The individual characterization of each boy influenced the sentences she wrote and readers will find themselves submerged in Lio's and Craig's minds. The darkness and light the reader shares with each boy is indeed a privilege.

(#10 of the 100 Book Challenge)

Book Review: When the Emperor was Divine

When the Emperor was Divine
Author: Julie Otsuka
Published: 2002 (2003 by First Anchor Book Editions)
Genre: Historical Fiction, 144 pages
Rating: 5/5

Sometimes a person likes to forget their own history. Sometimes a whole country likes to forget what their nation did in the past.

Concentration camps. This noun is often associated with the horrendous holocaust of Europe during World War II. But has the USA and the world forgotten about the concentration camps for Japanese Americans? Told in five points of view Julie Otsuka brings to life the painful mistreatment of Japanese Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in her novel When the Emperor was Divine. If you had Japanese blood you were a terrorist, a spy, an enemy.

This novel is so emotionally revealing I felt ashamed. Ashamed for what the USA had done and the fact I had forgotten. World War II is an old wound between the country I am from and the other country I am fascinated with. I prefer not to reopen it too deeply but Julie Otsuka's novel has bled the wound with just the right words. Not enough to cause a gush of blame but simply enough to remind the reader of our country's own mistakes in history.

(#9 of the 100 Book Challenge)

Book Review: Confessions of a Mask

Confessions of a Mask

Author: Yukio Mishima

Published: 1958, New Directions

Genre: Literature, Coming of Age (Japanese)

Rating: 4/5

Last summer my MFA mentor, Mitch Wieland, suggested I read the works of Yukio Mishima as I wanted to read Japanese literature. I purchased a couple of novels which were put into the pile of to read books. As I have confessed, I buy books faster than I can read them so Mishima's novels got buried. After reading Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood I knew it was time to give Mishima a chance.

Confessions of a Mask is the story of a young man who learns that he is unlike most of his adolescent  companions. Preoccupied with death and the brilliance of the male body Mishima's unnamed protagonist learns to live behind a mask. The complex social system of Japan bleeds from the pages as the MC struggles to become one with society both in his public and private life. 

The most gripping aspect of Mishima's writing was the interior monologue of the MC. I often felt myself becoming lost with the character's thoughts and emotions as he grows from child to young adult. Detached and unable to understand parts his world readers will find themselves feeling just as lost through the MC's thought process. The effect is successful as I began to question the sense of my own reality as I finished the last page.

(#8 of the 100 Book Challenge)