Book Review: "Love & Haight"

Love & Haight by Susan Carlton is an excellent snapshot of the issues of an era; surprisingly captured by an author who wasn't even born yet in the time this story takes place. Despite its heavy subject matter -- abortion -- the author paints a shockingly honest depiction of teenage youth's life in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970's, still in the height of the hippie free love movement. It's fully immersing without turning cliche, which is usually a problem I find with most stories set in the 60's or 70's, so this was a refreshing change of pace. And while the whole story leaves you with this sense that the girl is going to have her mind changed and not go through with the procedure... I think I was most surprised that the story DOES go there. Nor does it make it out to be a horror story... it shows that life goes on even after such an event. But at the same time, it doesn't at all take the gravity away from the act, and is just all around well-written. I give it a big 5 star rating.

Book Review: "Lush"

While Natasha Friend's books may be aimed at a younger demographic, I couldn't resist the urge to pick this one up -- mostly to see how the disease of alcoholism, and in that of a parent, is portrayed. (Given it's an issue I've grown up around my whole life, and since I still live at home, it still applies.) I figured it would be approached in one of two ways: either in a charicaturistic fashion that would most likely leave me rolling my eyes, or making anyone who's an alcoholic out to be an absolute monster in a bid to scare people away from ever drinking. Instead, I found the story of a girl who's painfully real, and hits right at home. And this story doesn't just cover the father's drinking... It covers how the disease affects the entire family with his actions. The mother tries to drown herselfi n excuses and yoga; the baby brother is too young to know the difference one way or the other; and the main character, Sam, harbors much resentment for her father's drinking. (Understandably so... and in reading it, it made me feel a little better to know I'm not alone nor an awful person for having some anger towards my own father's behavior when he drinks. I imagine anyone who reads this who's living in a similar situation probably feels much the same way.) Then catastrophe hits -- I won't give away a spoiler here, because it's more or less one of the pinnacle points of the story -- and the father is sent off to rehab. And then we get the very realness of how the family is left to cope in his absence. In another twist, the main character unwittingly starts to walk in her dad's footsteps with drinking as well. (This is something not many stories of this calibre seem to touch on, and I'm kind of glad it did.) And the story's end is one that's up in the air.... it neither paints a rosy picture of 'Oh hey, rehab fixed everything and we have a perfect life now!' nor does it say 'Dad came home and started drinking again. The end.' It leaves you to come up with your own conclusions, which I think is a very real way of handling this, seeing as with alcoholism, it's very difficult to ever consider yourself fully cured, and relapses are often inevitable. But at least the ending gives way for hope, which is something that most people reading this book are in desperate need to cling to.

I'm rating this one a 4 out of 5 stars.