Trigger 

By Susan Vaught

Trigger Warning. This story contains extremely sensitive content. 

This story by Susan Vaught, has become one of my absolute favorite books of all time. 

    This story takes place after a very traumatic event for the main character, Jersey Hatch. We don’t know him before this event, we have no idea of who he used to be, and we don’t meet him after he wakes up and starts his recovery. 

We meet him after all of that, after three+ hospital stays and all of the family therapy and occupational and physical therapy sessions. 

We met him as he reenters the world.

At first, the plot seems to be geared towards figuring out what happened to him. We know he’s coming home after a horrible accident that took the vision of his left eye, his control of the left side of his body, and a hole in his brain. He retained most of his awareness and ‘smarts’ but his ability to read social cues, and control and organize his thoughts was affected. He describes himself as “A five year old genius”. 

He can form correct sentences when he focuses, but sometimes what he was thinking about tumbles out of his mouth before he can stop it.

We soon find out that what had happened hadn’t been an accident. Jersey Hatch had shot himself in the head. 

The story shifts to him trying to figure out why he had shot himself in the first place, why he had tried to end his life. 

Jersey had made a lot of ceramic bowls and vases during his hospital stays, and he made a lot of these as gifts intended for Mama Rush, who was a friend of his grandmother. On his way to her house, the ceramic gifts fall and get broken.

These broken gifts are very symbolic of Jersey’s recovery. He made them in different hospitals, like he made progress getting his speech back and learned how to dress and feed himself and function with one bad arm and leg. 

Mama Rush and he started meeting every Saturday, and she gave him a list of possible reasons for why he did what he did, and he was supposed to explore all of the reasons until they found which was the cause. She also mended each gift, such as the ashtray, and piggy bank, showing the mending and progress that Jersey was making. However, a few items were unsalvageable, showing that things would never be the same, no matter how hard either of them tried. 

Mama Rush served as a mentor and a point of reference for Jersey. She leveled with him, treated him like he was a person, not a piece of glass just waiting to shatter. She made him understand that he had shot himself, to own up to it, and figure out why. 

This story shows all of the ugly afters. Jersey lost all of his friends from school, and he saw the damage it had done to his parents. His mother had to leave, and his father tried to hold the family together, like the gross glue-like oatmeal had made for breakfast everyday.

The end of this story brings the whole story together. Jersey finds the weapon that he had used, Mama Rush was in the hospital, his mother had left, and he was home alone. He finally figured out why he had shot himself, and now knew how to do it right.

Only, he doesn’t. He chooses to live, to make things right, and that is said and also symbolized in Mama Rush taking pieces of the ceramic bowls that couldn’t be fixed, and making a suncatcher with them, showing that something beautiful can come from the broken pieces. 

Vaught did not dance around the bush with this story. She said the ugly truth of how it is, and that adds to the feeling of the book. This is a story about hope. Jersey made a bad choice, and now he had to live with the consequences, but he decides he is going to live with them, and make the best of the broken pieces, he will live his life catching the sunshine, even if he has cracks and scars.

:)

The Alchemist

The Alchemist 

by Paulo Coelho

        Most of the books I usually consume are of the darker nature, ones that deal with dystopias, tragic characters and situations, along with a painful joinery against an enemy. The Alchemist, is not like the rest. This was a very uplifting, light, and charming story about a boy taking control of his life. 

It talks about taking control of your own life, making the best of every situation and going where life takes you. It speaks of a personal legend, which is discussed below in my comparison of free will and fate in the story below. I loved how this book was written, it had a lot of flowery language, but it is short enough where that is not overwhelming, and Coelho paints the world around the main character, Santiago, beautifully. I felt a sense of wonder and how while reading this book and after. I am defiantly going to recommend it to some of my friends and family members. 

Below is my analysis and fate and free will that are in this book. Enjoy! 

 During childhood, a common phrase kids hear from adults is “life is what you make it”. We are told that we can do anything we set our minds to if we work hard enough. Children usually have very high aspirations, like being the president or being an inventor, and those aspirations are praised by adults. However, as we get older, we start to question if our lives are really in our control; If we have can make our own choices or if every step of our path is already decided? Fate and free will are opposite forces, but both exist in The Alchemist. Paulo Coelho paints them as two coexisting forces that we can choose between. One’s perspective of their own life determines if they believe in either free will or fate.      

 Coelho uses two concepts to describe the tension between free will and fate. Free will is shown through Personal Legends. He describes a Personal Legend as “What you have always wanted to accomplish,” (Coelho 23). It is different than the fleeting interests that occur throughout life; It is a deep desire, or even a feeling of needing to do that task or achieve that goal. They are uninfluenced from others around us, Personal Legends are not hereditary, so everyone has a unique one. An example could be a child wanting to be an astronaut when they grow up and they are determined that their Personal Legend is to be an astronaut. On the flip side, The King of Salem, who served as a mentor to Santiago, talks about a Mysterious Force that represents fate. The king says “But, as time passes, a mysterious force begins to convince them that it will be impossible for them to realize their Personal Legend,” (Coelho 24). Meaning, that as one gets older and experiences more of life, they start to feel like their Personal Legend is unattainable from where they are starting, or what was delt to them in the card game of life. 

Continuing with the example, when that child gets older and graduates from high school and choose to go to college, while they still want to be an astronaut, the mysterious force has set in, and they feel that it would be too hard for them. This mysterious force is a result of adults believing, what the King called, the greatest lie, which is “That at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate,” (Coelho 20). Adults believe that their life is out of their control, that they can’t change anything in their life, and they create this mysterious force, which they unknowingly enforce on their children as they get older. This mysterious force is named so because most adults seem to forget their own Personal Legend, as Coelho said “People learn, early in their lives, what is their reason for being. Maybe that's why they give up on it so early too. But that’s the way it is” (Coelho 26). No one can pinpoint exactly when in their life they gave up on their Personal Legend, it is just accepted as what happens. That child begins to think that being an astronaut is not possible for them, they were not born gifted at math or science, their family is not rich, or they do not live in Florida where NASA training facilities are. Their parents suggest becoming an accountant for a reliable job that pays well, and while their inner child is refusing, they go to school for accounting because it is reliable and would fulfill the fate their parents made for them. 

A person’s fate and a Personal Legend could be the same thing, if one creates it for themselves without any outside input. They are both about accomplishing things in life, finding what your reason for existing is, exploring your mission in life. Becoming an astronaut would have been the child’s fate and Personal Legend. As we get older, they differentiate into a realistic possibility and a childhood dream. We start to see a fate that someone else determined for us. Our parents want us to get a good job and live in a two-story house with 2.5 kids, but we might want to live in a van on the coast with a dog. This person does not have the van or the white picket fence house, and since the house is easier and more socially acceptable, it seems like the better option. This mysterious force is just another word for “maturity”, meaning that it is the responsible thing to do to give up on one’s childhood goals and focus on more realistic accomplishments. This force sets in with age because adults are stingy with time, they know they are not a child anymore, so they think they must have a certain house, a certain amount of money, a spouse, and two children to be considered successful. The adults imprint to their children that that is what they should want, because that is what their parents did to them, and the cycle continues until someone breaks the chain. The one who does is often seen as the black sheep of the family, the odd ball, because they reject the lie and followed their Personal Legend. Santiago was that odd ball, and his story has been inspiring thousands to reject the world’s greatest lie and go after their own Personal Legends. 

:)

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

by Benjamin Alire Saenz

This book by Saenz and was first published in 2012 and since then has won four esteemed Awards: the American Library Association, the Stonewall Book Award, the Pura Belpre Award, and the Lambda Literary Award.

Let us dive into the review.

Summers were mostly made of sun and heat, but summers for me were about the storms that came and went. And left me feeling alone.

Did all boys feel alone?
The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain, (Saenz 293-294). 

The protagonist and the second leading role of this book were both named after ancient philosophers and political thinkers, who are famous for their writing about logical thinking and reasoning on different attempts to understand the world around them. Aristotle is one of the most well known philosophers of all time, and the name “Dante” was probably based off of Dante Alighieri, who was an Italian poet, philosopher, writer, and political thinker. Philosophers were obsessed with truth and reality. The title of the book is great because the characters Aristotle and Dante were discovering themselves throughout the book and what they wanted their lives to be, and aren’t our lives just our own little universes? 

I connected with the protagonist Ari right away. He is an introvert and doesn’t connect with other boys his age, or really anyone. He talks about looking up to guys a few years older than him and not understanding their obsessions with girls and how can’t see himself ever going through that girl-craze phase. 

Ari thinks about things deeply. He thinks about his connection with his father, mother, siblings, and other boys around town his age. He wants to control his life, but feels like there's only a few things he can control about it, and that's because he feels trapped, like he’s walking on eggshells. The fact he doesn't have a lot of friends and is good at fighting makes his parents nervous that he’ll follow in his criminal brothers footsteps, but it's his parents fear of him turning out like his brother and Ari’s own fear of letting his parents down that's making him feel trapped. 

Ari’s father is a Vietnam war veteran and is very distant and it bothers Ari, who wants to have a connection with his father. His father is described like he never came back after the war, like it wasn't over for him. 

The accident.

One major part of the story was a car accident that Ari and Dante were in. Dante was in the street saving an injured bird from being hit when a car came barreling towards him. Ari had pushed Dante out of the way and ended up getting both his legs run over. Both boys lived and Ari spent the rest of the summer in the hospital and when school started he was able to walk again. 

During this, Dante of course felt responsible and wanted to thank Ari somehow, which made Ari resent him. Ari didn’t want to feel like a hero for doing something to save his best friend. He feels like he didn’t do it, that it had been an instinct. 

During this time in their friendship, Dante let Ari look at his stretch book, and confessed his feelings for Ari that he loved him. The sketch book is symbolic of Dante opening up to Ari, about his feelings for him. Dante puts his feelings in black and white and Ari responds by choosing not to open the sketch book yet. He’s not ready to admit that he probably feels the same about Dante to himself yet. He is hesitant to not look into the sketchbook and see his own feelings reflected back to him.

I really enjoyed this story, there was some beautiful prose and lines, below I listed my favorite quotes.

“Maybe I would be happy. Maybe my life would be even worse. Not that I had a bad life. I knew that. I had a mom and dad and they cared, and I had a dog and a best friend named Dante. But there was something swimming inside me that always made me feel bad. I wondered if all boys had that darkness inside them,” (Alire Saenz 299).

”Sometimes, when you were older, you become someone younger. And me, I felt old. How can a guy who’s about to turn 17 feel old?”, (Alire Saenz 300). 

“I wasn’t really thinking. Sometimes, you do things and you do them not because you’re thinking but because you’re feeling. Because you're feeling too much. And you can always control the things you do when you're feeling too much. Maybe that's the difference between being a boy and being a man is that boys couldn’t control the awful things they sometimes felt. And men could,” (Alire Saenz 310).

I had a problem with the ending of this book. I am happy for Dante and Ari finally getting together, but I feel like Ari’s problems were bigger than just his sexuality. He talked about a darkness inside him, he always felt like he did or was something wrong, which I understand is accurate for anyone who might be questioning their sexual orientation, especially in 2012 when it was less socially acceptable to be openly part of the LGBTQ community, but it the reveal wasn’t big enough. It felt forced out of him by his parents. I think it would have been more impactful if Ari was honest with himself first, then his parents. 

I needed to see Ari going to talk to his brother in jail, and bringing Dante with him, so we could see how their relationship changed and how Dante is going to support Ari through life. 

I felt like getting with Dante shouldn’t have solved all of Ari’s problems, and that made the ending unrealistic and anti-climatic, it was like a sudden happy ending under a rainbow. But I do acknowledge that this book was written in a different time and probably helped a lot of people feel better about coming out.

I still loved this book and would definitely recommend it, but it is a downer with brilliant writing, so read this when you need something sad.

:)