Beginning in Cape Cod, 1988, Megan and Holly are teenagers and best friends enjoying the lights and laughter of a carnival. Acting on impulse, they find themselves inside the tent of an old psychic woman who delivers them a cryptic and chilling premonition. Spooked by what they hear, the two girls flee from the carnival.
Time then skips forward to 2009. Megan is now 38-years-old and a single mother earning a living as a freelance artist, as she raises her 14-year-old daughter, Olivia. Megan is gravely ill. The cancer she had once beaten has returned with a vengeance and she knows instinctively that her time is short. Faced with her own imminent mortality, and the prospect of the end coming sooner than she wanted, she must deal with the problem of who is to be Olivia’s guardian after her death.
Author Melissa Foster is a fearless writer who has produced a highly-charged emotional roller-coaster that will break readers’ hearts, as they progress through the story, and are made aware of the best and worst of human emotions and behavior. The author tackles controversial and sadly only too real issues, particularly in the part when Megan has to rescue Olivia from the clutches of a predatory rapist who has stalked her via an internet chat-room. This is an important issue: to raise parents’ awareness of the potential dangers of children being allowed to surf the internet, and the need to protect them from deviants who prowl cyberspace and hide behind avatars and aliases.
This is also a story of pain on duel levels: with one focus being on the physical and emotional agony that terminal illness brings, not only for the victim, but also the anguish experienced by close family and friends. This is coupled with the drama of the guilt the characters have over decisions they have made in the past, and the consequential stress of whether they should reveal these secrets to each other.
There are many themes for discussion: the many stages of life, those we meet and fall in love with along the way, the complexities of human relationships, the pain of illness, the mystery of death … including the transition of the soul after.
The overall message is that love overcomes all pain, and that death, no matter how agonizing and lingering, is only a temporary separation from those who have passed before and are waiting for us to follow them to that ultimately better place.
Nothing in this world lasts forever. Sooner or later, death takes all those we are closest to. It’s how we choose to come to terms and deal with that period of temporary loss and separation that is important.
The story includes an interview with the author, and a list of eight questions that make this story an excellent choice for post-reading discussions in book clubs.
R.P. McMurphy, an insubordinate, anti-authoritarian non-conformist makes the mistake of “acting” crazy to duck out of life on a penal work farm, believing he can sit out the remaining weeks of his sentence in the supposed ease of a mental asylum. His real problems begin when he is faced with Nurse Ratched, a smug and uncompromising matriarch who enjoys cutting men down to insecure children she can control. The entire story is told by first person narration, from the point of view of Chief Bromden, who sees authority as an all-powerful and ruthless combine. Bromden pretends that he is deaf and dumb in order to hide away from the world, content to simply be ignored by everyone around him. That is before the battle of wills between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched ensues and stirs up an atmosphere of rebellion among the other patients on the ward. Who is sane in this world? What issues does Nurse Ratched have that drive her to being a cruel, vindictive tyrant?
By turns hilarious, frightening and tragic, this is one of the greatest books ever written that shines a light on the concepts of sanity, freedom, dignity and the pressures of life and society on the individual.
The 1975 movie, starring Jack Nicholson as McMurphy, is one of the best movie adaptations.
On a trivia note, Christian Slater, who also bears a striking resemblance to Jack Nicholson, played the role of McMurphy in theatres and received great reviews.
One of the best sci-fi/fantasy adventure novels that would make a great movie, especially after the success of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, but sadly (to the date I write this) The Far Arena has never been picked up for film.
An intriguing story about a Gladiator – the greatest in his time – exiled after defying the Emperor, enraging the mob and offending the gods of Rome. Cast naked over the ice with a sword and shield to fight the cold, he expects nothing but death. Instead, he is awakened centuries out of his time.
Discovered by accident by an oil drilling team, he is dug out of the ice, thawed out and brought back to life. This opens another intriguing strand of the story and a problem for the characters who are caring for him and hiding him from the world: what to do with him? And how can he come to terms with his predicament, the knowledge that his own world is long gone and everyone he knew and loved are dead and untraceable?
Brilliantly written and entertaining as the narrative jumps from the 20th century to ancient Rome.
In 1975, a police unit working the night watch in Los Angeles indulges in off-duty drunken hedonistic orgies. For them, the ‘choir practice’ sessions are a coping mechanism, a way to vent and let off steam to keep from exploding from the pressures of their job and the world around them. They work hard and play even harder, until caution is thrown to the wind one time too many, resulting in a tragedy that brings them all down.
These cops are not the ‘white nights in blue’ of so many clichéd TV shows. These are all-too human, with all the faults, weaknesses and character flaws they have to contend with as they fight both the criminals on the street and the bureaucratic hierarchy they work for and gripe about in private. This is one of the best police-themed novels in that it describes the effect police work has on the officers. Maybe once idealistic, these officers are now embittered and disillusioned and just struggle to make it through the day like everyone else.
Written by a seasoned former police officer, the characters and situations described throughout this novel have an authentic feel about them. By turns harrowing and hilarious, with characters you can both laugh with and loathe in equal measure, this remains one of the author’s best works.
Central character, Ken Harrison, is a successful sculptor with a beautiful girlfriend. After seeing one of his own pieces erected as a public work of art, he is involved in a car wreck. He wakes up in hospital, to find himself paralyzed from the neck down.
As the months drag by, he becomes psychologically tortured. He is after all an intelligent and creative artist, whose passion and self-expression comes through working with his hands. Above all else, he lives to sculpt. Now that ability and freedom is gone forever. Finally, he decides that life isn’t worth living if he can’t live on his own terms – the way he wants.
Some of the nurses are sympathetic, while the inflexible doctor has a God-complex and sees death as an enemy to be beaten and life as survival no matter what. His own argument is that if someone has not reached their allotted three score years and ten – then they have no business dying!
Harrison, after thinking over his situation, the prospect of the years still to come, able to do nothing apart from being locked inside a paralyzed body, decides on a plan: to be released from the hospital so that he can be allowed to die.
He breaks off his relationship with his girlfriend and employs the services of an attorney to fight his case.
The doctor then fights back and attempts to have Harrison committed under the mental health act.
The movie version was released in 1981 and stars Richard Dreyfuss as Harrison, with Christine Lahti, John Cassavetes, Bob Balaban and Kenneth McMillan. It’s under-rated and has since been largely forgotten, but it deserves recognition as a topical re-release.
This could have been both depressing and maudlin, but the script is written with a dry wit to reflect Harrison’s intelligence, sense of humor and sensitivity.
A thought-provoking play on self-euthanasia.
As the title and argument states: whose life is it anyway?
Psychiatrist Martin Dysart is almost sleep-walking through middle-age on the downward slope to his twilight years. His marriage is passionless and empty. He goes to work at the hospital every day and helps the patients in his care.
At the behest of his friend, Hester Salomon, a magistrate disturbed by the case of Alan Strang, a young man who’s been arrested for blinding six horses, Martin agrees to take him on as his patient and becomes embroiled in discovering Alan’s motivations for his crime.
The psychiatrist turns investigator as he switches questions from the patient to his parents and uncovers Alan’s difficult upbringing in a home tainted with twisted religion and sexual repression. Rejecting his mother’s suffocating idea of God, Alan creates his own in the form of the horse, Equus.
But Alan’s God is a jealous God: “I am yours and you are mine.” And this inevitably is the driver for his heinous crime.
The more Martin learns about Alan, the more he is made aware of the bitter truth of his own existence and the role he plays in society. Martin finds himself in a dilemma; jealous of the all-consuming passion Alan has experienced in his life – even as deranged and twisted as it was – and realizing that he has never known a passion as deep, his own life is empty and he has no faith.
He confesses his envy to Hester:
“But that boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life. And let me tell you something: I envy it. …
That's what his stare has been saying to me all this time: 'At least I galloped! When did you?'”
As Alan worshiped his pagan idol and exulted in his passion and pain, Martin numbed himself with work and his studies of relics and mythical Greece.
Martin is left in doubt as to his expertise. Will he cure the boy, or simply remove his source of worship and ecstasy and make him like everyone else? In doing so, he knows that he himself will sacrifice the boy’s passion to the god of Normal. Passion, as he sees it, can only be destroyed by a doctor – not created, with the conclusion that the removal of passion turns people into ghosts.
In one section, Martin states the following as part of a self-deprecating monologue:
"The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes – all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills – like a God. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made lethal. The Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health, and I am his priest."
The 1977 movie, based on Peter Saffer’s play, is a powerful adaptation and one of Richard Burton’s best roles, with exceptional acting from Peter Firth, as Alan Strang, and Jenny Agutter as Jill Mason.
Equus is a dark, poignant and haunting drama that explores the nature of man, the passion and desire that drives him – sometimes to extremes, and the need for faith.
Beginning in Cape Cod, 1988, Megan and Holly are teenagers and best friends enjoying the lights and laughter of a carnival. Acting on impulse, they find themselves inside the tent of an old psychic woman who delivers them a cryptic and chilling premonition. Spooked by what they hear, the two girls flee from the carnival.
