ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE by Anthony Doerr (2014): A brief, albeit deeply impassioned, review

"Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever." - Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See 

THIS REVIEW IS SPOILER-FREE

Disclaimer: This review is constructed on my personal reaction to the book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. 

It’s currently very late and I am currently very tired, but I just finished reading Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, and I wanted to take a quick minute to share my thoughts on it. I doubt I’ll be able to live with myself until I’ve made some noise about this book.

Let me say first that while my head is buzzing with opinions on All the Light We Cannot See, I have also found myself almost completely speechless in the wake of its completion. I cannot seem to put my finger on the right adjective that will perfectly articulate how I feel. Exquisite is what I settled for in my Goodreads review, but it’s so much more than that: I tried phenomenal, spectacular, gorgeous, absolutely beautiful, a marvel, a triumph, a wonder to behold, but none of them seem to fit. This book simply eludes categorisation; I was utterly, completely, irrevocably blown away. Ironically, I wasn’t even going to pick up this book; I downloaded the .epub file instead of purchasing a hard copy because I was afraid I wouldn’t like it.

Little did I know.

A few of my favourite things about the novel:

1. I loved the characters. They were all so vividly imagined, sculpted out of nothing into beautiful complexity, raw and vibrant and each intensively unique. I particularly loved reading from Marie-Laure and Werner’s perspectives, although that goes without saying, as they’re our dual protagonists. Watching their individual stories arch out and then meet in the middle was positively breath-taking. They were captivating, dazzling, and sometimes also haunting -- so often I found myself holding my breath with anticipation, rooting my heart out for these lively, powerful, miraculous people.
2. I loved the writing. Doerr is inarguably something of a poet; the guy knows how to string a sentence together. His words sing in perfect harmony. I’ve never seen a writer approach writing with such tangible wonder and such finely-tuned skill. A poet, I’m telling you, and if not a poet then an artist, if not an artist then a visionary. Every sentence breathed; every paragraph soared. To read All the Light We Cannot See is to be bewitched, enchanted by its lyrical grace, stunned by its gorgeous words. My heart glows just thinking of it.
3. I loved the way it was honest. This book is set during World War II, so inevitably, it’s pretty sad. What I loved about it, however, was not the fact that it was sad, but how it balanced happiness and sadness, especially in its climax, to create an ending at perfect equilibrium: half melancholy and nostalgic, half quietly hopeful. Doerr wrapped up each storyline so neatly without giving everyone a happy ending. In fact, no one got a happy ending. What they all got was a peaceful ending, and it’s important to me that you understand that happy and peaceful are not synonymous here. I felt at peace when I finished this book, but I did not feel happy. That, I think, is a realistic ending. I said the storylines were all wrapped up neatly, and that they all ended peacefully, but I lied. Only some of them were/did, and I can’t say any more without spoiling the ending, but trust me when I say that even the inconclusive endings were satisfying, as implausible as that sounds. There is a gorgeous, refreshing honesty to Doerr’s narrative, a beauty to his blunt and unabashed conclusion. I could not speak of it more highly. I am struggling even now to put my praise into words.

To put it simply: this novel was brilliant. I cannot think of a single person who would not benefit from reading it, this story of love and compassion, ambition and duty, science and faith, wrong and right, life and death -- this tale of two strings of fate tangling, two radio-waves waltzing in the invisible light. Touching, gripping, heart-breaking, breath-taking, All the Light We Cannot See is, in my opinion, perfect.

(I think that’s the word I was looking for.)

Love, Death, and Power: A Tale of Three Brothers

"The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death."

From the moment Harry Potter opens, its main themes are quickly apparent: love and death. From Voldemort’s ambition to master death, to Lily’s loving sacrifice for her infant son, destined himself to die, these themes wind themselves throughout the series: for example, Cedric dies in a cemetery -- a place of death -- where Harry is saved through his parents’ love, and Dumbledore meets death at the hands of Snape, but not without compassion. Thus Rowling weaves these themes into her spectacular climax, a tale of three brothers trying to conquer Death, only to one by one be reclaimed into his clutches -- one for power, one for love, and one willingly.

THE FIRST BROTHER: So the oldest brother, who was a combative man, asked for a wand more powerful than any in existence [...] a wand worthy of a wizard who had conquered Death!

The first brother was a power-hungry man, determined that power would allow him to beat death. Hence, he taunts the ghostly figure of demise to grant him the Elder Wand, the most powerful wand in existence. The brother’s equal in Harry Potter is Tom Riddle or Voldemort, the name ‘Voldemort’ even translating roughly to ‘flight of death’ from French. Like the first brother, Voldemort lusts after power, following the Elder Wand’s trail of bloodshed to its source as a way of conquering, rather than accepting, death. To him, mortality is an obstacle, something you can avoid. He convinces himself that the Master of Death is the person who wields Death as a weapon, and so the Elder Wand is the only Hallow he actively pursues because he believes in power over death; he doesn’t long to wish others back, nor hide himself, from Death, but instead to defeat it. But the wand’s invincibility does not extend to the wielder. The first brother slays his enemies with his unbeatable wand, but he is later robbed and murdered while he lies in his bed, all because he put too much faith in the power of Power. Voldemort will die in a similar fashion.

Voldemort and the first Brother believe that the power to cast death will be enough to conquer it. The last enemy to be destroyed, for both, is dying. Voldemort seeks out the fabled Elder Wand because he believes he has earned it: “a wand worthy of a wizard who had conquered Death!” But Voldemort has not conquered Death, for he has not accepted it. Accepting and acknowledging the inevitability of death is to truly conquer it, which is why Harry is the wand’s true owner -- he accepts, unequivocally, that he has to die. No matter if he had rightfully won the wand or not, Voldemort would never be worthy of it, because he would never truly conquer Death; he treats Death as his enemy, but as we learn from Harry and the third brother, the only way to become Master of Death is to give in to it and accept it. In the novel Voldemort is reduced to Tom Riddle again, in the film becoming nothing but ashes scattered in the wind. He dies alone and powerless against Death, crumbling to dust and forgotten.

And so Death took the first brother for his own.

THE SECOND BROTHER: Then the second brother, who was an arrogant man, decided that he wanted to humiliate Death still further, and asked for the power to recall others from Death.

Love is a force more powerful than magic in the Harry Potter series. Rowling wants us to believe that love can transcend death; that it exists always, in death and before it. The second brother was an arrogant man, but one filled with longing, and so he asked for a device to retrieve people from Death: the Resurrection Stone. This theme of love and death is perhaps the strongest message of the series. For Harry, it that exists in trying to love past the grave, to love those who aren’t there, as it does for the second brother and his equal: Severus Snape. While Harry doesn’t understand how someone can be with him after they have passed, but still manages to move on, the Second Brother never lets go, and is driven mad, joining Death to feel that love again.

For Severus Snape, the last enemy that has to be destroyed is death -- not to conquer it, but to see Lily, his love, again. The second brother’s gift from Death was the power to raise the dead. Snape, in a sense, does the same thing, reanimating his late love not through Dark Magic, but through memory. Snape resurrects Lily every time he sees her eyes in Harry’s face; he cannot let her go, but he can love her in death. It’s poignant that the last thing Snape says is that Harry “has his mother's eyes”, because he’s looking at her when he passes. His love for Lily transcends death: “after all this time”, he still loves her. He will “always” love her. The word always is a special term, as it can mean even after death, hence why it’s so iconic: love can exist after death, with Snape loving Lily even after she dies.  

And so Death took the second brother for his own.

THE THIRD BROTHER: The youngest brother was the humblest and also the wisest of the brothers, and he did not trust Death. So he asked for something that would enable him to go forth from that place without being followed by Death.

The third brother was a humble man and simply asked for an object that would allow him to go forth from that place without being followed by death. His entire life, Harry Potter has lived under the shadow of death, but himself has never greeted it; instead he has been left in its wake. Harry is afraid not of dying, but instead of the divide that death creates. Harry struggles with the idea of life after death. When he reads on his parent’s grave, “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death,” and Hermione explains how it means living after death, all he can think is ‘But they were not living: they were gone.' In the Mirror of Erised and through the Resurrection Stone, Harry craves to have his parents with him once more. This is why he is shot so clearly alone in so many scenes.

And once Harry learns he has to die, his isolation is complete. Death no longer follows but waits as Harry walks alone into the forest for the last time. Finally, he must face Death -- but when he discovers the Resurrection Stone, he doesn’t understand how his family is already with him. “Why are you here?” he asks, to which Lily replies, “We never left”. Finally, the themes come to terms. His parents’ love did not die with them; it lived on, lived after death, transcended it. The ones we love never truly leave us; they live in our memories. Harry drops the stone, accepting that he doesn’t need to see his parents to feel their love, because love doesn’t leave after death; it remains “always”, and so that love guides him willingly to his death.

The Master of Death is said to own all three Hallows. But to own all three comes with a price:

To die.

To own all three is to accept that no power will save you, nothing can bring your loved ones back, and eventually you must shed the cloak and embrace Death yourself. Using the fairytale rule of three, JK Rowling started her series with a man in search of power over Death, a woman who would die for love, and a boy who would evade death for years. In the end, the man is reclaimed by death again, another man dies for the woman’s love, and the boy eventually sheds his protection and faces Death as an equal. Although he has earned all three Hallows, Harry Potter is the master and equal of Death because he finally understands: to destroy death -- is to accept it.

And, equals, they departed this life.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This one is actually a collab! I wrote it with my good friend Nick, who runs the YouTube channel you find when you type "nicholas dobbie" into the search bar. Originally, this was actually a script that we wrote together for his channel, but I like it so much that I decided to publish it here, too - and this is the unabridged version, so instead of watching a 9-minute video, you can read a 1.3k word essay! Nice! You can find the video by clicking any of the key buzzwords involving Nick or his channel. We worked our little butts off on this one, and it really paid off. Dude's good at what he does, I'm good at what I do, and we would both die on the battlefield for Harry Potter; this is the lovechild of that obsession. Check out Nick, if you've got a minute free; as much as I enjoy pointing at trashcans and saying they remind me of him, he is actually pretty talented, and is definitely worth a watch, if not a cheeky little subscribe. Yay for collaboration!

ROOM by Emma Donoghue (2010)

"Scared is what you're feeling. Brave is what you're doing." - Emma Donoghue, Room

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Disclaimer: This review is constructed upon my personal reaction to the book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. 

You know how I love The Martian? You know how I never shut up about The Martian? Well, I have good news: I’ve found another book that I love as much as The Martian. (That's right: another book I won't shut up about! Joy!) That book is Room by Emma Donoghue, and by another text, I don’t think I’ve ever been as thoroughly moved. I wasn’t even going to review this book, but as of writing, it’s been a week since I finished reading and I still can’t stop thinking about it, which I think might be the universe trying to tell me something. The novel is the story of five-year-old Jack and his Ma. Jack and Ma live in Room, an eleven-foot-square garden shed which, to Jack, is the whole world, but to Ma? Not quite. Ma knows the truth: seven years ago, she was kidnapped, snatched off the street and held captive in Room ever since. (I’ll let you figure out on your own who Jack’s father is.) I’m not going to pretend this was an easy book to read. On the contrary, it was painfully harrowing; often I had to stop reading mid-sentence and momentarily step away, simply overwhelmed by the two-piece family’s sickening reality. Sometimes, I felt physically ill. Other times, I felt empty, as if this book was draining the life out of me. It was an emotional rollercoaster, to say the least; definitely not one for the faint-hearted, yet still gorgeously touching, a stunning work of powerful art. Heart-breaking and breath-taking, Room was, for me, a wonder to behold. 

There are so many things I liked about this book, but my favourite thing about Room was how Jack didn’t understand what was going on. The narrative style was a daring choice on Donoghue’s behalf; rather than utilising the more sophisticated voice of Ma, who could have provided a darker, more affecting point of view, Donoghue chose Jack to be the narrator, using his limited perspective of the world and his unwitting innocence in stark contrast with the context to create that darker, more affecting POV through imagery, rather than taking the easy way out -- and it worked, astonishingly well. It was so sad to see Jack not get it. It was genuinely distressing to be reading and to yourself know what was going on, yet to have the very person telling you the story fail to grasp his reality, simply because he was too young to understand. That, in its way, made Room surprisingly disturbing. Donoghue’s use of a child’s voice and a child’s tunnel vision created this disturbing atmosphere, as we had to piece together the story through what Jack was seeing and understanding with his blunt, yet stunted comprehension of the real world -- and when it hit us that what Jack was describing was more than what it seemed, it hit us hard, as seeing a child’s innocence be mutilated always does. 

Jack’s innocence often made him disagreeable, too. Ma, obviously, understands that Room is not the whole world; she and Jack are prisoners stolen from the world, unjustly robbed of normal lives. But Jack is born in Room, and Ma realises that there is no point in teaching her son about the real world when she can’t prove to him that it actually exists. Why disillusion him with what he can’t have? Of course, once Jack starts asking questions and Ma is forced to tell him the ugly truth, said truth is extremely difficult for him to comprehend, as it should be -- he's just a kid, after all, and grossly adult things like kidnapping and captivity aren't things he should have to grapple with at his age. Yet Jack's failure to understand leads to a saddening lack of empathy. The poor kid doesn't really want to leave Room; outside is big and scary and full of People and Places and Things, three things he has literally never had to deal with. Ma, obviously, feels the exact opposite: while to Jack, Room is the perfect size, to Ma it has always been cramped, stifling, suffocating, the walls bearing down on her more and more with every passing day. She can see her life trickling down the drain as she wastes away in this tiny box, and she wants out because she knows there is an Out. Jack only knows In. Ma has a home outside of Room, but to Jack, Room is home, and he's perfectly happy there, thank you very much. Mother and son can't see eye to eye -- Jack because he's too little, Ma because she's too miserable -- and this creates friction, Ma often finding herself frustrated with Jack's lack of interest in escaping Room. Their  worldviews -- and by that I mean their literal view of the world -- differ so strongly and so vastly, a factor Donoghue lost no time in taking advantage of; Jack's stubborn nature was natural and convincing, a perfect representation of a child responding to trauma they don't even know they're undergoing, but it wasn't Jack's obstinacy that I loved so much in the book; it was because despite his stubbornness, despite what he knew and despite what he may have wanted, Jack tried his best to help Ma escape Room anyway, because that was what she so desperately desired. 

That, for me, was what Room was all about: sacrifice. Room is a book about a tiny, tight-knit family surviving on the bones of their asses; it's about a little boy running against everything he believes because his mother asked it of him. The tagline for Room is "Love knows no boundaries", and it's in Jack's sacrifice that we see it come true. Room is all Jack knows. It's where he was born, where he has grown up, where his entire world is contained -- but he is willing to remove himself from the literal boundaries of Room's walls and throw himself into the real world if it means Ma will be happy, if it means Ma will come back to him. This is where I found the ultimate poignancy and power in Donoghue's stunning novel. This book is a story about family. It’s about hardship, and suffering, and making the most out of an awful situation. It’s about learning, and not just learning, but education, too, and I assure you that there’s a difference in this book. It’s about living and growing and understanding each other, or at the very least, trying to; trying to empathise, trying to Get It, trying to do everything you can for the people you love even when you don’t Get It at all. With the force of a freight train, Room struck me and bloodied me and left me begging for mercy, but it also left me brighter-eyed, and not just because I was moved almost to tears. As author Audrey Niffenegger put it, when I finished reading Room, I looked up and found that the world looked the same, but I was somehow different. Maybe the world looked more beautiful than I remembered -- or maybe Room has taught me never to take that world for granted. God knows I’m lucky enough to be able to look out at it at all.

What the hell is water?: A reflection on the capacity of choice

Disclaimer: The following is a response to Kenyon Commencement Speech by David Foster Wallace. It is constructed upon my own personal reaction to the address. All thoughts and opinions are my own. 

Blink. Breathe. Think.

You are now conscious of the things you take most for granted; you are now conscious of the habits you usually do not pay attention to. You are blinking. You are breathing.

You are thinking.

Being selfish, I’ve noticed, is one of the most inherently human things you can be, yet as a society, we ridicule and slander and shame selfishness because in a world of seven billion beating hearts, to only care about one is deemed vile, repulsive, a trait from which you can never recover. What we fail to realise is that you really can’t recover from selfishness, because there is nothing more natural than it. Think about it: your own interests are your primary concern because they’re right there all the time. They’re immediate; the interests of others are not. The interests of others have to be communicated to you, brought to your attention, so it’s easy to just forget about and ignore them. There’s not a lot we can do about this. It’s our natural, default setting.

But it doesn’t have to be.

When my Year 12 English teacher handed me a copy of David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Commencement Speech and told me to give it a go, I had no idea I was about to read the piece of writing that would fundamentally change the very essence of the person I was. An address at Kenyon College in 2005, the Kenyon Commencement Speech (adapted into a book, This Is Water, in 2009) discusses a myriad of ubiquitous and important truths of human nature, but the one I want to reflect on here -- the one that struck a chord with me so pure that I still feel it reverberating somewhere in my chest -- is the fact that we have a choice: to live, or to live consciously. To only live is to succumb to our natural, default setting. That’s fine. A lot of people choose only to live -- although given that it is our natural, default setting, one can hardly call it a choice. To live consciously, then, is to escape our hard-wiring. It is to overcome the passivity of our unconscious consumption of the world; it is, as Wallace puts it, to acknowledge that it can actually be “within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars”. By living consciously, you are choosing when and where to extract meaning and significance from the mundane. You are choosing what to see. You are choosing what to value.

You are choosing what to think.

Yes: being selfish is one of the most inherently human things you can be. It’s completely normal to look at a situation and see only how it affects you, bothers you, changes you. To quote Wallace, “everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realest, most important person in existence”. Living consciously means looking at the same situation and choosing to realise that you are not the only person in it. I’ll give you some some examples. Let’s say you, like me, are an impatient driver, and one day you’re late for work and your knuckles are turning white as they grip the steering wheel and you’re grinding your teeth in frustration because the idiot in front of you is doing 30 in a 50km zone and if you’re late to work because this moron doesn’t seem to know what a speed limit is then with God as your witness, you swear, you’ll rear-end him just to teach him a lesson. You could choose to look at this situation and see only the cause of your own inconvenience. I mean, 30 in a 50km zone? Seriously? You could, however, choose to step back and look at the moment differently. Why is the car in front driving so slowly? (And I promise you, it’s not because he has a personal vendetta against you specifically, even though it probably feels like he does.) Sure, maybe he’s just an asshole. Maybe, however, he has something fragile perched precariously on the back seat and he’s driving glacially slow so as not to break it. Maybe his kid is lying across the back seat, but his kid has just broken their leg and he’s rushing them to the hospital as fast as he dares, not wanting to jolt the poor kid’s broken leg. Maybe this guy just has anxiety so bad that he’d rather not leave the house at all, but he has to go to work because how’s he going to pay the rent without working, so 30km/h is the fastest he can will himself to drive. Maybe he’s recovering from neurotic agoraphobia. Who knows? You don’t. Here’s another example: I had a bad experience at work once, when a woman, whose patience I dared test by asking her to wait for me to finish what I was doing, verbally abused me, attacking my competence and adequacy because I lacked the capacity to be in two places at once. As a customer service worker, it’s not uncommon for me to be ruthlessly degraded when I make the smallest of mistakes. People tend to treat customer service workers…. poorly, to say the least, because you never spend enough time around them to develop the realisation that actually, they’re a human being, just like you! Having read the Kenyon Commencement Speech, I’ve since been acutely aware of how a person’s indifference to or ignorance of conscious living affects my day-to-day life. For a long time, I considered myself a victim of the general public because they fail to be conscious of other people's’ lives. Only now does it occur to me that I’m also guilty of doing the exact same thing. That woman who yelled at me on the drive-thru; is she always that mean, or had she just had a bad day? Was she in a hurry to be somewhere? Maybe she was just a stupid cow -- or maybe she was picking up lunch for her son, whose chemotherapy session was beginning in half an hour. None of these scenarios, picked from a crop of a million possibilities, are likely, but none of them are impossible, either. You just have to choose to consider them.

Of course, we always have “freedom of choice regarding what to think about”, and with this freedom, you could choose to ignore the endless explanations, give in to your default setting, consume the world as if your “immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities”. Wallace and I, however, implore you not to choose this. I’ve come to believe, since reading the Kenyon Commencement Speech, that humans are made out of moments. Now, I was a chemistry student in high school, so I do know the science: our bodies and hearts and minds are made up of atoms and ions and stardust, but I think our souls -- for I do rather believe in that namby-pamby nonsense -- are composed of moments, tiny snapshots captured at random, seemingly insignificant seconds, and that these shape who we really are. I have also come to believe that these moments can only have meaning if we choose to construct that meaning ourselves. This is the second time I’ve reviewed and reflected on David Foster Wallace’s words, because two years after reading them, I still think about those words nearly every day. They changed me. They taught me the most important lesson I have ever learned: we must escape self-centeredness, we must break free from the human condition of selfishness and solipsism, and we must learn to consider and be conscious of other people’s lives having the same importance as our own, even though it’s hard, even though it’s easier to just forget that other human beings exist in the same cognitive capacity as you. If we don’t utilise our power to choose, we are choosing not to think. So think. Blink, breathe, think.

And make your choice.

CHALLENGER DEEP by Neal Shusterman (2015)

"Just because it's a long voyage, doesn't mean you're on it forever." - Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep 

TRIGGER WARNING: MENTAL ILLNESS

Disclaimer: This review is constructed upon my personal reaction to the book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. 

There are two things in life that are almost impossible to explain: the inexorable infrequency of human emotions (AKA why I feel like shit when my life is practically perfect), and why you love a certain book. Keep this in mind when I say it's going to be really difficult for me to articulate why I love Neal Shusterman’s 2015 novel Challenger Deep so much, but I’m going to have a crack at it anyway, so bear with me. I’ve read many a book on mental health and mental illness, so I know it’s not a topic that’s easy to talk about. Not all mental illness books are good mental illness books. Challenger Deep, however, is a very good mental illness book. I’ve known since I read Unwind in Year 11 English class how talented a writer Neal Shusterman is, and Challenger Deep only further confirmed that for me. This novel is simply exquisite. Challenging the archetypal representation of mental illness in literature, Challenger Deep manages to do the impossible: it puts the ‘hope’ in ‘hopeless’.

Admittedly, it took me a while to get into the novel -- the first hundred pages or so are a little disorienting, which is, I realise, the point -- but once the two parallel storylines start to weave, magic starts to happen. Now, let me set the record straight. Calling it ‘magic’ may give the impression that Shusterman’s take on mental illness has a whimsical, fairytale quality to it. That’s not what I mean at all. What's magical about it is how Shusterman has taken whimsy and fairytales and dragged the romance out of them kicking and screaming. Because that’s the problem: all too often, mental illness books romanticise the hell out of mental illness. Fortunately, Challenger Deep isn’t guilty of this at all. It uses whimsy and fairytales, but it distorts them, drags them through the mud, makes a monster out of them, giving the mental illness at hand -- in this case, schizophrenia -- a dream-like, but also nightmarish, quality. Because that’s what schizophrenia is, right? It’s so often mischaracterised as a multiple personality disorder, but it’s far from that. Schizophrenia is characterised by difficulty in distinguishing between what is real and what is unreal (helpguide.org), and can cause hallucinations, paranoia, and psychotic episodes. It fills your head with dreams, but fills real life with nightmares. This is why I think Challenger Deep is so important: it gives a realistic depiction of the disorder without making it seem quirky or cute. The storytelling in general did a fantastic job of illustrating how difficult people with schizophrenia find it to differentiate between what is and isn’t real; there’s a section I really liked where the POV changed from first to second person, so that You, the reader, were the one suffering psychotic delusions, rather than the protagonist, an excellent technique. However, it was Shusterman’s initially confusing, but ultimately highly rewarding, use of parallel plotlines that did the best demonstration. Featuring the same main character but in two opposite-end-of-the-spectrum scenarios, this plot device left the reader to try and distinguish between what was and wasn’t real. It forced us to empathise. It forced us to understand.

Yet not all is bleak. With mental illness fiction, there’s always a fine line between a hopeful ending and a hopeless one, and regrettably, most don’t walk it well. Challenger Deep is, again, an exception to this rule. One can’t call it a particularly cheery read after also calling it monstrous, but it’s not all a downwards spiral. What Shusterman seems to understand -- and has thus translated beautifully into Challenger Deep -- is that mental illness is, in almost all cases, incurable. It’s not the same as a headache or a stomach bug or even the flu, eradicated if you take the right dose of the right antibiotics for the right amount of time. Mental illness lurks. It can recess and retreat and recuperate for indefinite amounts of time, but eventually, it always comes crawling back. Like the tide, it comes and goes in waves -- but that’s the thing: it comes, but it also goes. You can’t cure it, but you can always fight it. You can always hold it back. You can always hold out hope. Challenger Deep is refreshingly grim, but also hesitantly hopeful. Shusterman acknowledges that although people suffering from mental illnesses will always be susceptible to them, it’s also always possible to part the storm clouds, find the sunlight, reach out and touch the hope that it’s not always going to be this bad. Mental illness is “always waiting… [it] will never go away. No sense in denying that such things happen.” Storm clouds are inevitable -- but so, too, is the sun.

I could wax poetic about this book for pages, but part of what I so greatly enjoyed about it was figuring it out as I went along, so I’ll leave the rest to the imagination. In parting, I’ll leave you with this. I was deeply touched by Challenger Deep. It moved me, affected me, educated me, and above all, resonated with me long after I closed the final page. If I haven’t done a good enough job of praising it in the last 800 words, I’ll chalk it all up to the impossibility of explaining human emotions, or maybe describing why you love a good book. All you need to know is this: a book that can render a writer speechless is a very good book indeed -- but a book that fills a writer up with things to say is a gift among gods and men alike.

TL;DR: Just a quick trigger warning: this novel does contain discussion of mental illness, self-harm, and suicide. My full review only mentions the first of the trio. I began Challenger Deep with no idea what it was about. I knew only that it was a mental illness book; I didn’t even know which mental illness it was. I’m so glad I went in blind, because part of what I loved about Challenger Deep was feeling my way through the dark. Among other things, this novel is dark. It’s not a happy story, but it’s not a hopeless one, either. It’s whimsical, but not in a fun, Disney™ Princess way; it’s more of a I-think-this-is-what-an-acid-trip-looks-like feeling. Mostly, however, it’s honest. It does not sugarcoat and it does not romanticise; mental illness is a monster, and Challenger Deep sees no reason not to show it as such. This book does not mess around. This book is straight with you, and I simply can’t articulate how thankful I am to have chanced across it. It is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, a masterpiece.

A GAME OF THRONES by George R. R. Martin (1996): Femininity and Feminism in 'A Song of Ice and Fire'

"When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground." - George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

DISCLAIMER: This analysis is constructed upon my personal reaction to the book. All thoughts and opinions are my own, and I reserve the right to defend said thoughts and opinions if they are challenged. That being said, feel free to disagree with me. I don’t own you. Just don’t try and challenge my views on Sansa Stark. She’s my baby, okay? I’ll protect her at all costs. Furthermore, if you decide to read this book because of this review and end up not enjoying it, I humbly apologise. I think the book is great, but that’s a matter of opinion.

I’ve just read A Game of Thrones. I know -- in literally my last post I said I didn’t like book series’ anymore, yet the first book I decided to read this year was the 800-page opening instalment in one of the heftiest series’ in popular culture -- and although I didn’t think I would, since high fantasy isn’t my thing, I loved it. Of course, as the neighbourhood feminist, one of the things I’m most enjoying about the A Song of Ice and Fire saga is the depiction of female characters. Probably the most famous thing to ever come out of author George R. R. Martin’s mouth is “I’ve always considered women to be people” (in response to “You write women really well and really different; where does that come from?”), which has marked him as a quasi-feminist writer ever since he said it. However, I was skeptical -- the quote, while poignant, has a rather Joss Whedon-esque, I-set-the-bar-for-feminism-so-low-I-could-walk-right-over-it vibe -- but upon embarking on the series, I’ve changed my tune. Men, women, and children are all treated equally by GRRM (that is, he kills them all off with equal disregard), so in that respect, I think it’s fair to say that A Song of Ice and Fire casts a respectable rotation of ‘strong female characters’.

Of course, this is feminism, so I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t controversy around this subject. Often, the trope of the ‘strong female character’ is misread; ‘strong’ is commonly interpreted as alluding to considerable physical strength, and if that were the case, A Game of Thrones would have almost no strong female characters at all. Here’s what I consider a ‘strong female character’: a woman or girl who demonstrates character development, emotional complexity, and realistic humanistic qualities, who is written justly and written well, who is not flawless but deeply flawed and who grows because of and in spite of these defects. Physical strength is not compulsory, but it is a bonus. TL;DR: if they’re a well-written female character, they’re a strong female character. Their strength is in their storyline. The misinterpretation of the definition of a strong female character, then, originates from a misunderstanding of the difference between character, and characterisation. As a writer myself, I can vouch for this: how the character is written is vastly different to how well the character is written. Take Arya Stark, for example. Like all of GRRM’s characters, she’s well-written, but she also fits into the typical ‘strong female character’ category because she defies societal norms by nonchalantly disregarding gender roles. She’s a ‘strong female character’ because, as a person, she refuses to conform to the regimented, traditional roles of women in the contextual society. If she were to be actively concerned about oppression -- which she isn’t, because she’s 10 -- and to comment on it occasionally in her inner monologues or in dialogue with other characters -- which she doesn’t, because, I repeat, she’s 10 -- she’d basically be a perfect Action Girl (TV Tropes). Rebellious, courageous, cocksure, and suffering from a severe case of stick-it-to-da-man-niosis, Arya is not only, I’m realising as I write this, a stock-standard Gryffindor; she’s the poster child for strong female characters. And she’s 10.

But what of Arya’s older sister, Sansa Stark? Sansa is my favourite character for reasons I can’t quite explain, but I know without having to Google it that many will have misread her as a weak female character, when, in my opinion, she’s one of the strongest. It’s crucially important that we remember the difference between character and characterisation here. On the whole, Sansa is of weak character. She is quite vapid, can be astonishingly selfish, has limited capacity for complex analysis, and, spoiler alert, sells her family out in petty revenge and resultingly contributes heavily to her father’s beheading. However, she is characterised extremely well. This makes her an incredibly strong female character in my eyes, as while as a person, Sansa sees herself as nothing more than Prince Joffrey’s betrothed, born to serve no other purpose than becoming the Baratheon boy’s future wife and babymaker, GRRM certainly doesn’t see her as such. She is characterised as more than just a piece on the Lannister chess board, because Sansa Stark is made of sterner stuff than that. She’s a crucial link between the Starks and the Lannisters/Baratheons. She’s obedient and disciplined and understands the importance of the traditions Arya shrugs off, even if her understanding is rather basic (because she’s 11, man. Let her live). She also functions really well under pressure and has excellent social skills, quite a schmoozer for a kid, and although she’s simple, she sees things as they are because of this. She has a true eye, and a true heart. Something else I find really interesting about Sansa’s character is her femininity, in juxtaposition with Arya’s masculinity (forgive my cisnormativity -- it’s suited to the contextual time period of A Song of Ice and Fire). Arya is a ‘masculine’ female character -- hates dresses, loves the outdoors, prefers to sword-fight rather than sew. Sansa, then, is in every way her polar opposite. She enjoys, and thrives in, ‘feminine’ activities: sewing, dancing, wandering in the meadow with the crown prince, daydreaming about marrying the crown prince, just admiring the crown prince in general. She prefers the “traditional pursuits of a noblewoman” (A Wiki of Ice and Fire), which I think adds to the excellence of her characterisation. What she wants is marriage and motherhood, which may seem anti-feminist, but feminism embodies the idea that you can be whatever you want, be that warrior or wife or neither or both. Plus, she just wants everything to be nice. Who can’t relate to that?

One can’t talk about female empowerment in A Game of Thrones without mentioning Daenerys Targaryen. There are two reasons why Dany is one of the most famous characters in A Song of Ice and Fire and HBO’s Game of Thrones: Emilia Clark is unbelievably hot, and Dany’s character arc is quite honestly phenomenal. At the start of the book, she’s timid and docile, a young girl afraid of her psychotic brother’s unquenchable rage; by the end of the book, she’s still young and she’s still afraid, but her fear no longer controls her. If I look back, I am lost. Here, the characterisation is simply exquisite; in that sense alone, Dany is a strong female character, but wait, there’s more! Not only does Dany, like Arya, defy gender roles; she straight-up ignores them at the end of the book, in one of the most powerful and empowering scenes I’ve ever read. Yet similar to Sansa, Daenerys also places great value in being a wife and mother. She’s the middleground between the two Stark sisters, a perfect balance between masculine and feminine -- strong, confident, a loyal and just leader, but also sensitive and sentimental, even nurturing at times. She’s one of the most badass characters in the series so far, and also one of the strongest female characters because of her well-crafted character development and flawless blend of stereotypically male and female characters. To my little knowledge, she is one of GRRM’s finest works.

I don’t know if I made it obvious, but I loved A Game of Thrones. On all fronts it was a simply stunning experience, but I simply can’t get over how brilliantly executed the female characters are. Although George R. R. Martin writes most of his characters in roughly the same style, each individual narrative voice is distinctive and unique, each personality detailed and defined, and ever female character driven, whether that be by love or loathing or latent disrespect. Most importantly, the female characters are strong, both  of character and of characterisation.They all, especially those mentioned above, show character development. They’re all emotionally complex, conflicted at every turn. They react in the most human way to happiness, sadness, pain, fear, and most notably, grief. They are deeply, but not irrevocably, flawed, and their strength lies not in their sword arm, but in their storyline. I’m sorry I was skeptical, Mr. Martin. Your statement may have been pretentious as hell and more than a little self-congratulatory, but you really do write women just as they are: people.