Hello, booktube! I am Beth. This is Read
Remark. Today, I'm going to talk about the
book So Lucky by Nicola Griffith.
Thanks for joining today. So Lucky follows our
main character named Mara. She's really
at the top of her game in a lot of ways.
She heads up this really huge powerful
AIDS Foundation. She's at the end of her
long term marriage with her wife, but at
the beginnings of a burgeoning
friendship that may turn into romance
with her longtime friend. She's also,
personally speaking, very good with
martial arts. It talks about all of the
practices that she goes through with her
dojo and how powerful her body is with
that. So she's got all of these things
going on and she suddenly finds out that
she has multiple sclerosis, or MS for
short. I had to look it up to see exactly
what it is because I wasn't completely
sure. It's where there's nerve damage
that causes your brain and body to not
quite communicate with each other, so you
might see some trouble with walking or
stumbling or getting your arms to move
or getting your body basically to do
what you want it to do. For Mara in
particular, it's kind of difficult
because when she goes to do her martial
arts, she finds that her body betrays her.
It's not doing the things that she's
always been able to do, and feel powerful
within her own body. She also finds it
affects her at work and it also affects
her just out in the world, in all the
places that are not really easily
accessible to people who have
disabilities. There are a lot of things I
really like about this book. In
particular, I like the messy emotions
that comes with the diagnosis. You know,
Mara is not one of those people who sits
on the back porch with the glass of tea
and, you know, spits out platitudes to
family members about how wise she is now
and how it's given her a new lease on
life, and she's just this, you know, giver
of comfort and wise words. You know, she
hasn't turned in to Tuesdays with Morrie.
She gets angry, angry, angry. Angry at
everything that comes up and
she does not
hold it in. She spits it out with bile
and vile hatred. You can really see her
move through the stages of grief. And the
anger stage, she sits in for a very long
time. And to be honest, I probably would, too.
I also like that it shows the
realities of living with MS. It's ... it's
very difficult from what I've read in
the book to deal with all the different
medicines and the almost treating
yourself as a science experiment to try
and find what works. Spoiler alert:
there's a lot that doesn't. One of the
things I didn't care for so much in this
book was the murder subplot. Yes, there's
a murder subplot. In the course of
dealing with MS, Mara starts to kind of
take charge of her life and take action,
because that's always what she's done.
She's been a taker of action. Through the
course of all of that, somehow there's a
murderous person who catches on to other
people who have MS. It's a really sad
thing to add on. Not that I'm against
things that are sad or gruesome, but in
this tight, concise novel that is almost
perfect in every other way, this murder
subplot seems almost superfluous.
It's not really needed and it kind of takes
away from Mara's journey to herself in
dealing with MS. It didn't really need to
be there. One interesting thing about
this book is that it's actually somewhat
autobiographical about the author.
I didn't realize that until after I had
finished the book. Apparently, Nicola
Griffith also deals with MS. Now the book
itself is of course fictional, but the MS
and everything that Mara is dealing with -
these aren't things that the author just
made up out of thin air. These are things
that the author has experienced, herself,
and so it's very interesting to read
about and get that perspective that I
wouldn't have known otherwise. It's also
a book that is on the Tournament of
Books, brought to you by The Morning News!
You will hear me talk about this yet
again this year some more in February, as
you had the last couple of years. This is
where you take the previous year's best
books, pit them up against each other,
March Madness style, and
see who comes out on top.
[Music]
The title So Lucky could be taken one of
two ways. It could be sarcastic, like,
(said sarcastically) "Ohhhh, I'm sooo lucky. Thank you, universe, for
giving me MS. I reeeeeeally appreciate it."
Or it could be genuine. It could be that
Mara, through the course of dealing with
MS, has realized that she's lucky in a
lot of ways. She has this wonderful
community of fellow MS people with whom
she has connected and whom she helps and
who helped her. She's found that while
some friendships have fallen off, other
ones have really managed to flourish in
the wake of the diagnosis. And she's
found that even though her body has
pretty much betrayed her in many ways,
she's learning to listen to it in other
ways. And so, even though the conditions
aren't ideal, she finds that she's just
so damn lucky to live in this messy,
horrible, complicated, but sometimes
beautiful world. We're just so damn lucky.
So, very good book. So Lucky by Nicola
Griffith. It is not a tear jerker by any
means. It's a very straightforward,
unsparing look at MS and what it is to
live with it.
And it's actually enjoyable, which is an
odd thing to say about a book of this
nature, but I enjoyed it. So, check it out.
Thank you so much for watching guys.
I will catch you next week. Bye.
[Music] Thank you and special shout out to all of my closed caption watchers!
(blooper) ...But adding on this murder sub, superdf is ...Gaaaah!
(trying again) ...pretty certain the murder subplot
seems almost superft...god!
No comments:
Post a Comment