richardrbecker's reviews
497 reviews

A Separate Peace is the story of Gene Forrester. He is a quiet, intellectual student at Devon School and his best friend and roommate is the polar opposite. Whereas Gene can keep up as an athlete, his real strength resides with academics. His roommate can be described as everything else.

Finny is charming, self-confident, athletic, and a daredevil without ever being arrogant. It is as if he knows himself to be extraordinary, but wears it like someone might wear a jacket. He doesn't have any inclination to best or defeat anyone. He merely enjoys competing with himself, relishing the idea that others might join in his long list of personal challenges.

At the opening, it seems Gene admires these qualities. But by the fourth chapter, he become conscious of his secret and growing resentment toward Finny. He is weary of Finny being the natural leader, the better athlete, and the more charismatic student who can talk his way out of anything.

At the dark heart of A Separate Peace, identity and transformation become pivotal themes. They are not just important for these two boys but several other classmates as well. As a summer of innocence metamorphoses into the winter of discontent, Elwin "Leper" Lepellier becomes the boy to enlist in the military and Brinker Hadley finds room to assert himself as a new leader at Devon.

While the narrative is honest and introspective given the setting and circumstances, it can be difficult to impose one's willful suspension of disbelief on the story that presents such an extreme social shift — one that comes across as hundreds of years in the making — in less than a decade. It's also difficult because Atwood's speculation doesn't follow her Reagan-era inspiration to its logical conclusion, but rather to one that warps evangelicalism to such an extreme of its extreme that the idealistic utopian regime she does create feels forced and farcical. It's only when you pretend the protagonist Offred is born into this fanatical imagining, rather than part of the generation that allowed it, that it feels like it could fit.

So, it's not so much that her speculation of an oppressive, totalitarian, religious government can't happen in America. It's that it seems desperately unlikely in the manner she describes, in the speed in which it happens, and in the abruptness of the change. If not for her captivating delivery as a writer, it is quite likely its bleakness would have one been boorish in someone else's hands.

Although John Green is already a best-selling and award-winning author with two collaborative works and four books, The Fault In Our Stars is easily his most ambitious work. Not only does he take on the challenge of making his ill protagonist an adolescent girl, he also molds together a near-adventure story into a beautifully moving contemporary classic.

The Fault In Our Stars is a breakthrough in simultaneously taking on the awkwardness of adolescence and challenges of living with a terminal disease. Although he takes the subject matter head on, his decision to make Hazel sick from page one immediately casts the affliction as expected and accepted because it has to be. This makes it possible to laugh with the characters throughout, even when the story takes a crushing turn toward the end.

There comes a point in the first few chapters of Room by Emma Donoghue when readers have to make a choice. Either they allow the narration of a five-year-old boy to annoy them or they can roll along with it as his voice matures and more adult dialogue helps move the story along.

For some readers, it won't be an easy decision to make. But the longer they take to make it, the harder it will be to enjoy the subtitles and substance of the Room, a novel about perspective as much as anything else. Jack and his mother have two very different world views.

"I always saw the novel as having two halves, each would shed a different light on the other," says Donoghue. "As always happens with a book in two parts, reviewers tend to prefer one over the other: many find the second half more ordinary, but a few find relief after the claustrophobia of the first."

While some may have a favorite half, Donoghue is right. Neither can exist without the other. It is Jack's ability to compare two very different worlds that completes the book. It also reinforces the haunting justification of their captor — that somehow they should have been grateful to be isolated from it.

Inside, it's the physical space that confines the mother and son. Outside, it is the social mores that can feel suffocating. While the author never suggests the former is better than the latter, she does make a statement about how petty, judgmental, and restrictive that society can be, especially the media.

Once they are free, the mother-son protagonists find that the outside world can be both kind and cruel. For them, everything becomes a dangerous and life-threatening wild card.

The best thing about Room: A Novel is when the story moves beyond the opening routines and settles in on their plans of escape. The most challenging parts of the story are in attempting to reconcile the size of the room (overtly cramped) and the attitudes of some adults once they are out. Empathy is surprisingly rare among most of them.