Saving Francesca (a book review)

Today: Awoke. Ate a bagel. Sold Girl Guide cookies at Sears for two/too hours/long. Dropped home on the way to work. Made an egg sandwich. Rushed to work while eating aforementioned sandwich. Packed groceries for two [long] hours (x3 = 6 hours). Got home. Poured smoothie. Sat on couch with computer, drinking aforementioned smoothie.

That was a beautiful smoothie. But onto my obsession with Melina Marchetta. *sigh*

I love Melina Marchetta's books. They are the food for my soul that I didn't know that I needed. And that is a bearable cliche because it's also the truth. Her books make me feel whole and broken at the same time, in the best ways. All I do is inhale and exhale the words and yet they make me want to be better. A better person. A better writer. A better daughter. A better sister. A better friend.

I don't know how she does that.

A summary
Francesca is starting her second term at a school that was just for boys until recently when they opened their doors to girls. She misses the consistency and complacency of her old school and her old friends and to add to the unease, her mother won't get out of bed.
The novel chronicles Francesca's struggles to slide, struggle free, through school and keep herself from falling apart. It's about love, romantic and otherwise, and friendship and being saved but mostly it's about saving yourself.

A couple comments
-- The voice of the book is so genuine and honest that you can barely set it down. Francesca's words have a cynical resilience that is remarkable and relatable, to me at least. Marchetta has such a way with sentences and paragraphs that I honestly feel as if I could survive on these beautiful words. Almost.
-- The characters are unique and plucky and whole. They're people you want to know, want to believe exist. The community and support and love and friendship are just something you want to experience. These are friends I'm jealous of.
-- I love Francesca. I love her and I feel like she's a piece of me, or I'm a piece of her. I don't know if I've ever really felt so similar to a character in so many ways. And sometimes so different. Francesca is like my dark side, I think.
-- Will Trombol.

-- The dialog. I am such a huge dialog fan that it's ridiculous and Melina Marchetta does not disappoint.

-- The story is just so believable. It's not like 'mother with depression' is a new concept for a book but it works here on so many levels. There's the gleam of romance. The trials and doubts and happinesses of friendship. The angst of teenagerdom. The reality is both unhappy and hopeful. Depicting not depression so much as the effect it has on the people it touches, the truth of this story is just so real. This story feels like something you could live in, even if you wouldn't want to all the time.

A recommendation
Read this book. I did, twice in one week. It's worth it, so ridiculously worth it.

Saving Francesca is officially on the favourites list. And it's getting to be a long list.

some books - On the Jellicoe Road

You have to finish reading them at 3 in the morning for two reasons. 1. There comes a point when you can't stop and you forget that you should be asleep and dreaming and that it's starting to get light outside. 2. When you're done and it's hours past midnight, you go to sleep. You know that's what you're supposed to do whereas when you finish at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, you can't close your eyes and wake up in four hours and start with a fresh new day. You have to sit on the couch with the closed book in your lap and stare at nothing because you can't even speak for half an hour after turning the last page.

So I don't regret only getting five hours of sleep in the space between Saturday and Sunday.

How could I not love that feeling? I feel like I was born to feel it with its all consuming reach as I am enveloped in someone else's story. Are readers born or made? I can't tell and I guess it doesn't matter but I am always wondering why more people don't take up reading for pleasure. What are video games and sports and needlework and shopping to letting words on a page swirl around you in a story until you don't even remember what's real anymore. I love books way too much. And they've ruined me. I guess I let them do that.

On the Jellicoe Road by Melina Machetta was extraordinary. Truly exquisite and so heartbreaking and profound that I don't really feel like I'm the same person that I was starting it. It's about hope and trust and love and abandonment and what happens when you feel like there's nothing left to hold on to.

This summary will seem completely inadequate but regardless: It follows Taylor Markham who was abandoned on the side of the Jellicoe Road when she was ten. She is now seventeen and leading her school in the territory wars between the Townies and the Cadets and she gets to find out that the leaders of the two groups are not soulless thugs but real people, tangible and alive. There's also Taylor finding out about five teenagers who lived in the area twenty years ago and how they relate to the territory war, her life and everything she really knows about herself.

Like I said, completely inadequate.

There's intensely great character development, supremely well woven plotlines and breathtaking romance. I could probably go on about how much I loved this book for a while longer but I'm not going to. All I will say is that if you like incredible books, read this one.
I will add that the beginning is confusing and you may get lost or feel dizzy with all the different characters and story lines spinning around you. To this I say, keep reading. Melina Marchetta is like Marcus Zusak in the way that it all makes sense at the end. It's one of those books where if you get past the first 30-50 pages, you will be undeniably happy you did when the story starts to untangle in a way that's so organic you can't even understand why you doubted it in the first place.

I hope that as I get older, I will keep this late night reading habit of mine. I wouldn't want to lose the feeling of being so far away that I ignore time, hunger and sleep to feel someone's else's life so deeply.

Q: Have you read any books lately that made you stay up too late to finish?