Weekly Reader: Semicolon: Life Goes On From A Different Perspective: Living With Purpose by A.P. Aristeiguieta; Captivating Spiritual Journey Into Deep Emotion, Strong Friendships, and Lucid Dreams

 Weekly Reader: Semicolon: Life Goes On From A Different Perspective: Living With Purpose by A.P. Aristeiguieta; Captivating Spiritual Journey Into Deep Emotion, Strong Friendships, and Lucid Dreams

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: Is it too early to pick a potential favorite book of 2023 because I found a contender?

Semicolon Life Goes On From A Different Perspective Living With Purpose by A.P. Aristeiguieta is a captivating, lyrical, and spiritual book that tells a fantastic story about loneliness, depression, and friendship. 

Semicolon is not unlike some of my other favorite books in the past like Imajica by Clive Barker, Melia in Foreverland by Thomas Milhorat, The Thursday Next Series by Jasper Fforde, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, The Unseen Blossom by Zlaikha Y Samad and L'mere Younossi, The Enchanted World Series, Tales From The Hinterland by Melissa Albert, The Bookbinder's Daughter by Jessica Thorne, Kaleidoscopic Shades Within Black Eternity by David A Neuman, Merchants of Knowledge and Magic by Erika McCorkle, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass). It's a book that is thought about, felt, and lived in as much as it is read.

According to the Introduction, this is somewhat based on a true story, a semiautobiographical novel or a literary nonfiction, on incidents from Aristeiguieta's past. Aristeiguieta's author surrogate is Amy, a teenager who has been hospitalized.  One night, she sees a little boy, Tito, standing by her bed and who appears to be a friendly spirit of some sort.

Amy is released and after a while, her parents send her to a boarding school in Mexico. At the airport, she meets Alberto, a talkative teen about her age who is heading for the same destination and quickly becomes an intelligent and very odd friend to her.

Semicolon is a book that asks as many questions as it provides answers, allowing those to explore their own inner conclusions about what they experienced. It is both thought provoking and visceral at the same time.

The book's excellence starts with its protagonist. While books about troubled teens are nothing new, Aristeiguieta takes great care to capture a young brilliant but fractured mind on the verge of falling into existential loneliness and emotional numbness.

At first, there are some hints about the cause of Amy's hospitalization but we aren't told anything definite until later. She lays in the hospital bed thinking about how she got there. She was someone who felt invisible and lived inside her own head. (What depressed, lonely, imaginative kid hasn't felt that way? Heck what depressed, lonely, imaginative, adult still doesn't feel that way?) One day, she wanted to end those feelings and attempted to take her own life. 

She also reflects that even during her hospitalization, her frequently arguing parents couldn't stop blaming each other, throwing herself even further into despair. She finds no comfort in outside existence so she retreated into her own solitude but when even that failed to soothe her, she decided to kill herself instead.

 This is a very accurate description of long term depression that someone feels when their usual escapes and coping mechanisms no longer work. After all, you can read, watch TV or stream videos, or play games all day. But eventually the book will close, the credits will roll, and the game will be over, and the real world unfortunately has to be lived in.

Tito and Alberto act as sort of spirit guides towards Amy. Throughout the book, Tito leads Amy through various astral projections and lucid dreams to see different views of the world around her. She travels through moments and memories that aren't just hers but belong to other people and recognizes different parts of herself that she thought were long gone.

In the hospital, he astrally takes her out of her room to observe her family, other patients, and their concerned friends and family members. She is able to connect with others in a way that is greater than what she has felt in a long time. Tito is able to open up a warmer part of Amy's personality that still exists underneath the sadness and depression. Later, Tito takes her to a park where there are balloons and a party. This opens up the youthful childlike side of her as a counter to the cynicism that she has developed.

While Tito helps Amy, his appearance does not suddenly solve all of Amy's problems. Her parents send her to the boarding school, partly because they are concerned that she may try to attempt suicide again but also so their arguing and eventual separation does not affect her fragile state. At the school, she is just as isolated as she was at her old one. Luckily, Alberto, the boy that she met at the airport, attends the same school and instantly becomes her closest friend.

Alberto serves a different purpose for Amy than Tito. One could compare Amy's time in the hospital to her being reborn. When she meets Tito, she is like a child and children often communicate with pictures, simple words, and concepts like "love," "fun," and "happy." 

When she goes to the school, Amy re-enters her teen stage. Teenagers are full of questions, confused about the world and their identity, and struggling to understand it. Alberto helps her in that respect.

Alberto is a more human presence than the ethereal Tito. While he is an actual human (possibly), he is very intellectual and intuitive. He asks Amy provocative questions about her beliefs and experiences and shares his own views. He is someone with a deep faith in Judaism but is also open to other spiritual practices like the concepts of lucid dreams and visions and the existence of parallel dimensions. He's like a Teen Guru advising Amy intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.

He guides Amy into putting her time with Tito into words and discovering what it could actually mean. 

It is very refreshing that even though Amy and Alberto become close, they do not develop a romance. Aristeiguieta was wise to avoid this because it shows that there can be great value in platonic friendship and that two people, even teenagers, can find connections that are built on mutual trust and care and not necessarily on lust. In developing her friendships with Tito and Alberto, Amy is able to understand her relationships with others like her parents and learn more about herself, maybe even love herself. 

Semicolon is a punctuation symbol that joins two independent clauses without using a coordinating conjunction like and. That's what this book is about, joining independent clauses: things that shouldn't exist at once but somehow do. Things like life and death, dreams and reality, sleep and awake, emotion and thought, dark and light, and childhood and adolescence. They're like Yin and Yang, divided they make separate halves and different sections of a story. When they join together, united, they make a whole picture and story. 

Through her dreams of Tito and her conversations with Alberto, Amy goes on a metaphysical journey by means of astral projection, parallel dimension travel, and lucid dreams to show her a deeper world of love, hope, and the power of one's mind and spirit. 

Whether this book is literally or metaphorically true, it is a powerful account of the mind, heart, soul, and spirit.

New Book Alert: The Beached Ones by Colleen M. Story; Bizarre and Unique Life After Death Fantasy Reveals The Strength of Fraternal Love

 

New Book Alert: The Beached Ones by Colleen M. Story; Bizarre and Unique Life After Death Fantasy Reveals The Strength of Fraternal Love

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews 

Spoilers: Some believe that ghosts become so because they have unfinished business. They have to send a message, look after someone living, or have to meet some goal or at least be told that the goal has been met before they can ascend in the spirit world. 

Colleen M. Story's fantasy, The Beached Ones, is about a man who has died but has an emotional connection that keeps him tied to the human world.

The man who has passed on, ceased to be, is no more, and gone up and joined the choir invisible (too much Monty Python sorry) is Daniel A. Shepherd, who is part of an Extreme Sports team. He remembers a show in L.A. in which he and others flew over the heads of the people watching, then nothing. Daniel is confused particularly why no one can see or hear him and why he can move quickly from one place to another. After Daniel manages to communicate with his former girlfriend, Jolene he learns that he died during that stunt in L.A. Daniel needs the help of Jolene and her current boyfriend, Brent, who can also see and hear him, to go to San Francisco where his younger brother, Tony, is waiting for him. 

The Beached Ones is a bizarre and at times beautiful book that explores life after death and the connections that the dead made with the living. 

Story's depiction of the Afterlife is deceptively normal at first. It takes a while for Daniel to realize that he's dead because things seem so normal but somehow are off. Daniel has form and substance. Jolene can even touch him. There appears to be no set patten over who can see him and who can't, so one could attribute the behavior of others as they are simply ignoring him. It's only after he sees the article online of his own death that he realizes the truth. Even then some things are kept from him until the time is right for him to remember them.

Once he starts to investigate the matter, Daniel's experience in the Afterlife has some interesting perspectives. He travels wherever he wants from state to state with only a thought. A supernatural creature appears to be stalking him and can take other forms. 

In one beautiful passage, Daniel appears on a beach and views a pod of whales. He sees a mother and her calf being beached and tries to free them. This moment serves as a reminder for those that he left behind.

This moment with the whales foreshadows the connections that Daniel left behind in the world of the living. He and Tony were abused by their mother. Daniel protected his younger brother and practically raised him by himself. Realizing that his brother is alone, propels Daniel to find and reunite with him. This fraternal love is lovingly  explored as Daniel worries that crossing over could mean leaving Tony behind. The whales symbolize Tony and Daniel's relationship and how Daniel cared for his brother and wants to return to him.

The afterlife portrayal in The Beached Ones is fantastic but it's the emotional bond between the two brothers that is the real heart of the story.

New Book Alert: Behind The Veil by E.J. Dawson; Sinister and Spooky Supernatural Horror Straddles Between Madness and Sanity

 

New Book Alert: Behind The Veil by E.J. Dawson; Sinister and Spooky Supernatural Horror Straddles Between Madness and Sanity

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: E.J. Dawson's Behind The Veil is among the best Horror novels that I read this year. It is a genuinely terrifying account of both paranormal and real life fear with a protagonist who hovers between frightening visions and her own fears which could develop into paranoia and insanity

Letitia Hawking is a 1920's widow who emigrated from her native Britain to California. She is trying to bury the grief of losing her husband, a miscarriage, and a traumatic encounter with a Spiritualist that left her scarred and institutionalized. 

Since Letitia herself has ghostly visions and Spiritualism is on the rise, Letitia offers herself as a medium who is able to peer into the deceased's last days.

Her visions are both sad and eerie as she sees how a person died and their final thoughts. The book begins with her seeing a sickly man who is grateful to die so he can get away from his loveless marriage but worried about how his wife will treat their child and his mother now that he is gone.

 Letitia's visions are complex as she sees deep sadness, frustration, anger, fear, and sometimes relief to get away from the cruelty of the world around them. Many of her clients are grateful to hear the loving final thoughts of their friend or family member. Some are in denial that their behavior was a contributing factor to the deceased's decline and death, as a very stern father is when he sees the final memories of the troubled son whom he threw out.

However, because of the emotions connected with natural death alone and her own trauma, Letitia is reluctant to take on cases where someone was murdered. She fears that she may lose her own mind in the recall of a violent act or that experiencing the trauma second hand may end up killing her.

Besides her frightening second sight that stalks her, Letitia also has to contend with more human persistence. She is constantly followed by the very wealthy Alasdair Driscoll who uses threats and intimidation to take on a personal case for him. At first, Letitia refuses citing previous commitments and her own concerns about what he wants her to do. She also sees a dark presence surrounding him, one that forms a barrier trying to keep Letitia away.

But finally moved by the pleading of his sister, Mrs. Imogen Quinn, Letitia agrees to help him. She meets Quinn's daughter and Driscoll's niece, Finola and sees the real reason for their interest in her. Finola is alive but like Letitia she is gifted or rather cursed with second sight supernatural abilities. And as they did for Letitia when she was younger, Finola's visions are harrowing and threaten to eat away at her sanity.

Behind the Veil is scary for the supernatural and human haunting that surrounds the novel. The horrors that Letitia sees through Finola's eyes become more troubling for her. It's similar to someone becoming blinded by seeing something twice as bright or losing their hearing because a stereo system is cranked way too loud. Letitia and Finola's visions become worse because they are shared between them. When she goes inside Finola's head, Letitia sees spectral images of murder,violence, sexual assault, and pedophilia. She particularly sees a crime affecting several young girls that until now was left unsolved. Letitia continues to see the dark spectral presence becoming larger and more powerful. 

 Because of these dangerous thoughts, Finola is left alone in her room unable to socialize for fear that she may lash out violently. Driscoll and Quinn are so anxious about their young relative, that they are considering putting her away in an asylum.

The more Letitia probes into Finola's mind, the more that she sees echoes of her own past. She too was institutionalized by people who didn't understand her abilities. She even doubted them herself. The passages describing Letitia's time in the asylum are actually more horrifying than her supernatural premonitions. While in the asylum, Letitia was subjected to the ice cold bath treatment, early versions of shock therapy, neglect and abuse from employees, and isolation. What is more frightening is that her memories are not the results of some dark unexplained presence. They are the results of those who were all too human, a system that puts the mentally ill away to forget about them rather than helping them or discovering why their minds are the way they are. It's no wonder why Letitia becomes protective of Finola. She doesn't want her to suffer the same fate that she did.

Behind the Veil is a sinister novel that asks the question about which is scarier: the supernatural world that exists beyond human consciousness and is only experienced by the very few or the real world that surrounds and haunts us every day.

 

Weekly Reader: It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini; An Understanding And Always Relatable Book About Mental Illness

Weekly Reader: It's Kind Of A  Funny Story by Ned Vizzini; An Understanding, At Times Funny, But Always Relatable Book About Mental Illness

By Julie Sara Porter,

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: It's Kind of a Funny Story is one of those books that I find spookily relatable. It hits me the way books do when you see your life told in someone else's words.

Though I am miles apart from Ned Vizzini's protagonist, Craig Gilner in age, gender, income, and lifestyle I can see myself in him because both of us have depression and anxiety. Many of the examples that occur throughout Craig's narrative are uncomfortably familiar not only to me but to anyone else with mental illness.

Craig’s depression and anxiety are ways of coping with intense pressure from school. He is brilliant but doesn't feel excited about anything he is learning. He can't find any interest in any school activities or happiness in any activities at all.

The one work he enjoyed was making maps as a child, but he destroyed them when people told him that he could never be a map maker because “everywhere has been mapped.” He only likes to play the PlayStation and get high with his friends.

Those of us with mental illness can understand those times when nothing excites us and we just go through the motions. We can also understand when we take interest in something and how others’ or our own perceptions cloud even that interest.

The pressure increases when Craig gets accepted to a prestigious Manhattan academy. While he considers the acceptance a victory, he is constantly filled with anxiety and worry with each test and assignment. He becomes obsessed with worrying about graduating, getting accepted to college, and getting a job.

People with anxiety and depression keep fearing the worst and worry that one failure or disappointment is going to lead to more. (Craig's anxieties are manifested as a drill sergeant in his head that keeps pushing Craig forward.) It's hard for us to find even slight happiness in achievements because we are always second guessing our decisions and imaging the worst.

The book has some interesting touches that aren't often found in other books on mental illness. While Craig is diagnosed with depression and prescribed Zoloft fairly early on, during an upswing he believes he is completely recovered and stops taking it only to result in worse mood swings afterward.

Many people who are mentally ill often go through brief periods of extreme productivity and experience happy giddy feelings usually because of positive external moments. Sometimes the slightest disappointment is enough to bring the euphoria down and the depression and anxiety returns sometimes worse than before.

While Craig has suicidal thoughts, Vizzini doesn't make him actually attempt the act. Instead after a night of calling the Suicide Prevention Hotline, Craig decides to walk  two blocks to the psychiatric ward and voluntarily commit himself.

There are many who aren't mentally ill that believe if a person isn't a violent threat to others or themselves, then they really don't have a mental illness. Some throw out terms like “drama queen”, or “first world problem” as if to dismiss those feelings and the person having them. Vizzini's writing shows that depression and anxiety come in all forms and sometimes the moment when someone realizes that they need help can be just as individualistic as the symptoms preceding it.

When Craig is institutionalized in the adult section of the psychiatric ward (the teen ward is being renovated), he bonds with the other patients, many of whom are just as troubled as he is. There is Muqtada, Craig's roommate who is so agoraphobic that he won't leave their room, Armelio, who believes he is the President of the World (or the Ward anyway), and Noelle, a potential love interest for Craig who has a history of self-mutilation.

Craig also receives help from his therapist, Dr. Minerva and Nurse Monica, medical professionals who are truly committed to helping pull the patients through their hospitalization.

Craig learns to sort out his anxieties and fears and to minimize them in his life. (The drill sergeant in Craig's head even becomes encouraging towards his recovery.) Craig also reignites his love for map making turning his maps into works of art to be displayed in the ward. He also begins to look forward to his release where he will leave his high-pressured academy and begin art school. While Vizzini's book shows there is no one specific path to recovery from mental illness, one thing that helps is to find a goal to achieve and possibilities for a life outside of the illness.

Like other great books about mental illness, such as Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, It's Kind of a Funny Story humanizes the illness by giving us an understandable character to go through it. Those who have been there can relate. I know I do.

Weekly Reader: Veronika Decides To Die by Paulo Coelho: A Lovely Story About Madness and Sanity Let Down By A Terrible Ending

Weekly Reader: Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho: A Lovely Story About Madness and Sanity Let Down By A Terrible Ending
By Julie anda Porter, Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers Ahead: The next book in January's Coelho-thon is much darker but at the same time it is a moving and lovely story about death and mental illness. It is for the most part equally as brilliant and well-written as Brida and The Alchemist. However, it is let down by an ending that contradicts not only the rest of the book but much of Coelho's other writings.

Veronika, a young Slovenian woman, is bored with a life of sameness and powerlessness. So one night she writes a note, swallows a handful of sleeping pills, and lies down to die. When she wakes up, she finds herself in the psychiatric hospital, Villete, with heart palpitations and a diagnosis that she has a few days, a week at most, to live.

Veronika is a wonderful character. She seems like a woman that most people think would have no problems. She is close to her parents, has many friends, an active love life, a good job as a librarian, and is very beautiful. Many outside would think she would have no reason to committ suicide.

But like Esther in The Bell Jar, Veronika proves that sometimes the seemingly most contented people could face those dark nights of pondering their mortality and feel nothing about the days ahead. While Veronika starts out very fragile, she gains strength and purpose during her time in Villete.

At first Veronika is reluctant to make connections with the staff and other patients since she has so little time left. However, despite her reservations, she begins to bond with the other patients. Slowly she befriends the other patients and joins the Fraternity, a group of patients that meet and share stories and understanding becoming a surrogate family.

Veronika bonds with patients like Mari, who heads the Fraternity and draws Veronika into their group. Another memorable patient is Zedka, an older woman who suffered from a broken love affair and generations of mental illness to become a guide to Veronika. Zedka tells the younger woman stories such as that of a kingdom whose citizens, including the king and queen, drank from a well that produced madness to show that madness can sometimes be a relative term. Sometimes to those who are mentally ill, they are sane and the rest of the world is mad.

Through her new alliances, Veronika opens herself to new possibilities and reignites her talent in playing the piano. Veronika's playing interests Eduard, a patient diagnosed as schizophrenic but actually institutionalized by his family when they disagreed with his intellectual and artistic pursuits. Coelho no doubt related to Eduard's character, because according to his biography, Coelho's father had him institutionalized when he took Coelho's literary ambitions and non-conformist nature as signs of mental illness. This information plus a strange metafictional almost unnecessary conversation between Coelho himself and Villete's owner's daughter also named Veronika, makes this a very personal book for Coelho.

Which makes the ending even more disappointing. While Veronika gets into a beautiful relationship with Eduard, takes her interest in music seriously, and learns to embrace life, it is at the cost of honesty. I won't give away the ending except the decision by the Villete head, Dr. Igor is extremely manipulative and almost offensive. While Coelho's other books state that the "Universe conspires to help you get what you want", Dr. Igor almost strangles that notion by engaging in reckless treatments towards Veronika and never tells her of them. Coelho also does the Reader a disservice by not following up with  that resolution leaving it dangling and Veronika's fate uncertain. What should be a book in which the Reader could have sighed with relief at the second chance that Veronika had been given and hope for a better future for her, this Reader wants to throw the book in frustration at the betrayal Veronika received from her doctor. And her author.