Status Updates From The Invisible Life of Ivan ...

I'm not sure if I'm going to like this book yet. I don't know if I'm too happy with how heavy handed it is in "this is an important story" narrative. I prefer when I get to decide when a story is important. I'm not quite sold yet, though I haven't gotten to the meat of the story yet.

Ivan & his comrades seem to be facing conflict in merely the way they were born, and the way they are treated by the nurses and the media, who cannot really understand what is happening in their heads. It's kind of insane how much I sympathize with Ivan, despite not having it nearly as bad as he does. It's a great story.
pt. 2/2

While this book seems to be more about Ivan's life in the hospital than the outside culture's world, it is interesting to see how the nurses act, and the culture inside the hospital differs from our own hospitals here. For example; I'm sure that no nurse in a similar hospital in the states would put up with Ivan's vulgarity or want for alcohol at the age of 17 at 5am.
pt. 1/2

The narrator divides the residents by their intelligence in a way that’s dehumanizing , and while I expect a 17-y-o to do this, it’s not okay. The book fails the test where I imagine it being about another disenfranchised minority group written by a person not in that group. This, in short, is why the world needs disabled authors to tell stories about disabled people.

When authors/editors go through the trouble of describing how a manuscript was found, came to be published, to insert foreign untranslatable slang into it and explain the translation process...it makes me REALLY disappointed as a reader when I find out this is a fictional novel.

Stop playing games with me.