Aimee (Book It Forward) > Recent Status Updates

Charlie realizes that Ma always wanted a silently present son and in the worst tragedy of her life, she’d had her insane prayer answered.
She always gave Charlie a hard time saying “That’s the different between your brother and you. You always need all the attention in the room.”

That is where your family lost you...A black hole, in which no telescope could ever locate you.A place of pulverized years, an infinitely heavy blindness, a forsaken desert island in the pooling vastness, and where could your family find you now? Perhaps only in another unlikely idea. Only in the stories they still tried to believe.

It’s over. Hector says to Oliver. Okay Oliver says. Hector says, I had to stop him. Okay Oliver says. He bought me a dog Hector says. Appropriately, your last word was a question. “Who?” Oliver says. And then there was a blinding violence, a terrible whiteness, a crack in time.

I’m noticing that Oliver’s chapters are told by a narrator. He says “You were feeling afraid, but couldn’t say why” etc. Who is telling Oliver’s story if it isn’t him?

Side note...I hate how the author spells Rebekkahs name in this book. It’s highly unnecessary in my opinion to have such a random spelling of a common name with an explanation in the book as to why her parents decided to name her that.

“Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid.” -Goethe Jed says this to Oliver when he is at the school dance about to walk over to Rebekkah

July in West Texas was a lot like deep February in four season country. When you were locked inside for unending days, time became a slack, amorphous substance,the chiming of the clock like some hourly repeated sardonic quip.

Some doubt is being cast over whether or not Oliver is really communicating. Jed doesn’t believe that all of a sudden he’s communicating. He thinks that Margot is making it up after all these years. Eve wants so desperately to believe it but she is having doubts only after Oliver says he wants to see “Dad”. He only ever called his father “Pa”, not Dad.

I keep thinking about how it would feel to be like Oliver and be trapped in my body. It’s a terrifying thought! All the thoughts you must have over the years of wanting to die I imagine. The claustrophobia...yikes

But you didn’t need your mother to explain her frustration; you are your mothers favorite, an invisible umbilical still connected you, and you knew that the defeated way she had often looked at you across the dinner table those last weeks was just a result of accumulating evidence that vast and vital part of your life but take place beyond the 200 acres of home.

I don’t want to post spoilers...but there has been a change

I know I should feel bad for Charlie, and I kind of do, but he annoys me. He is kind of slimy.

It wasn’t only those five people who died that night. It was also the other future that could have been theirs that Hector had murdered at a school dance when Charlie was 13 years old. 10 years had passed, despite his best efforts Charlie was exactly who he been in those first days, after silent son, accompanying his mother each day hardly saying a word. What had changed? Only the year.

The Loving Family is such a mess. Charlie says the loss of a garden (from his English Lit class) is a metaphor “that we all feel we lost something in childhood, some thoughtless, innocent state before we knew better.” Charlie knew his family before the shooting wasn’t paradise but he thought they at least had the idea of paradise. He felt that lost the idea of paradise, the other family they might have been.

Charlie had never felt too much familial danger because of his romantic life, that much he could say for his parents. Charlie merely grew up, and the fact of his inclination became as apparent as his taller than average height, his thinner than average frame. But the citizens of West Texas were not all as progressively minded.

His towns tragedy had become a relatively small statistic, just a datapoint on the updated infographics to which liberal Congresspeople angrily gestured each time another demented young man attempted to outdo his predecessors.

It had gotten crowded, that wicked pantheon. Those lonely, hormonal, zealous, and demented young men. Unleashing hell in classrooms, military bases churches, nightclubs, movie theaters, shopping malls, airports.

Hector had thought he might use the weapon in his hand like a different kind of machine, one that could convert his lonesome agony into the blackest kind of public fame, detonating private misery into public bloodshed.

Well, that’s true. It’s a tragedy, what happened to your brother, a great shame, like I said, but these attacks are at like what, one a month now. Honestly? Can’t blame people for getting fatigued on the whole topic.

Margot the speech therapist is trying to find a way to communicate with Oliver. Using an EEG machine, she would ask him to do things like blink once for yes, twice for no. Then when that didn’t work, she moved on to other types of movements. Using his jaw, tongue,eyebrows, etc.

When Oliver was discussing that he thought his future would be, he decided not to become a poet because he didn’t want to end up like his father. A failed artist married to a woman he did not quite love. When he tried to think of something else he could be, the only professions that came to mind we’re just a child’s trite replies to the question of grown up plans: a doctor, a lawyer, a fireman.

I like this book a lot. However, the story is dragging a bit.

Jed is destroying his art. “But his sledgehammer couldn’t pound out a loud enough sound to cover the noise of all that he’d never said.”

Jed is trapped in a prison of his own making. Drinking, isolating himself and replaying the events of the night his son was shot over and over.

Jed is trapped in a prison of his own making. Drinking, isolating himself and replaying the events of the night his son was shot over and over.

Her boys were the shape of her days, and behind each hour was the impossible prayer that they never grow away from her.

Eves always felt unloved. “ Wasn’t it pathetic how, even into her late 30s, she carried on like some nervous teen, taking Jed’s disappearances as rejection, then wanting so badly to prove that she was worth staying with? She truly hated this thing in her, that attention starved girl, for whom no closeness could ever disprove the intensive education in unlovableness her father had delivered to her

Eve steals things from stores that Oliver would want as he got older. Books, computers, clothes etc. she thinks that by doing this she is keeping the hope alive that he will pull through.

The world was always happy to unveil a new cruelty, and here was one of the cruelest; eve was so deeply alone where she needed help and so public in the parts of her life she wanted to keep to herself.