Heroes of the frontier: Funny, entertaining, discursive...

[Luis]

Hey, guys!

So, I don't know. I haven't finished it yet, and truly I don't think I'm going to finish it by this Monday, but I'm about half way, and I don't expect the funny-ness, the entertaining-ness and the discursive-ness are going to change in the rest of the book.

It's definitely funny, I've laughed out loud in a number of passages. For example, the one she's ranting about Evelyn having cancer and she's the one to blame, even when Evelyn was a smoker with an unhealthy mouth. Or Carl needing to continually go to the bathroom, that was hilarious :D

Or super touching moments, like when Paul heals Ana's chin. After hitting herself, Paul basically makes up a half magic, half real way of heal the injury. He puts "some kind of lotion in his hands" and then he says:

"Let's make it warm first," he said. After it was whatever temperature he deemed right, he applied it to her chin with the utmost delicacy, and Ana's eyes registered a pleasure so great they had to close. After the cream was spread evenly, he blew on it, "so it dries quicker,"" and so, until Ana calms down. Beautiful!

But then, he has passages I'm pretty sure he could have either deleted in the rewriting or simply don't write them in the first place. Too explicative, leaving too little to the reader to imagine how these characters feel. I can't find one right now (again, excuse my lack of rigour), but there is a gazillion of those.

Also, there are various of the kind of "Josie turned on the radio, heard Sam Cooke singing some simple song, and thought that only writers of pop songs and singers of pop music really knew how to live." If all would've ended here, I would've appreciated it. But no, after that comes a discharge of thoughts that I would rather imagine than to read them (actually I'm reading the beginning of the book and is super discursive, it doesn't seem at all a story but an essay). However, there are a couple of paragraphs that, man, really make some thought comments about the present, and US, don't you think?

So, I don't know. I still have mixed feelings. Even when is a great narrative and things happen, and the story moves at a good pace (in 150 pages she goes from being in an RV in the middle of nowhere, to tell us about her past, to arrive her sister's house at Homer, and having an accident, etc.), I feel that the whole story could be told in way lesser pages. But probably is only my anger that I won't be able to finish it by this Monday and I'll be spoilered :D

Anyhow, what do you guys think? :D

See you on Monday!
Luis B.

[Luis]

BTW: Please, please!!! Excuse my English! :)