This is a memoir of a fourteen-year-old boy's failed suicide attempt and the subsequent recovery and healing process of both body and spirit. As you can probably gather from the title of the book, the young man is burned terribly. He discusses the long, painful experience of burn care in graphic detail. He also describes his reticence or inability to speak insightfully about the inner despair that led this terrible act of self-destruction.
As I read this book, I found myself wincing in vicarious pain. I squirmed in my subway seat while reading about the involved skin-grafting procedures the narrator endured. As I read on, I became a bit frustrated and impatient with the narrator's "flat" attitude. I wanted him to come to a revelation about the root of his depression. But this book is honest, and doesn't include the happy Hollywood ending we get used to with this kind of story. And this honesty, while sometimes maddening, is also the beauty of this book.
I would be interested to hear from others who have read this book. Does this story appeal to young readers? Although it is told from the point of view of a teenage boy, I wonder if teenage boys can relate to the ambivalent narrator. I wonder if anyone else sometimes became almost angry about the narrator's insistence on superficiality to avoid deeper sorrows.
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2 comments:
I've been recommending this book to everyone I've met since finishing it last week. I agree that the narrator's emotional distance is both maddening at times and also the strength of the book. The voice felt very real to me for this very reason, b/c the story comes across as being told by the conflicted, disconnected 14-year old who sets him self on fire instead of by the reflective 30-sth who is looking back with adult wisdom on the struggles of a younger self. That forces us as readers to grapple ourselves with some Big Mysteries of youth -- the self-destructive urges that seem (to me) to stem from isolation; anger at a falseness in self, others, world, dreams, etc; quest for power; and a very immediate need to jump off the growing-up train sometimes.
I loved this book for the unsettling mix of scary drama (the fire and pain) and total banality (Cindy Crawford posters and hospital food). Fire is a metaphor I return to again and again in my own musings about adolescent feelings and so the fact that this kid's metaphorical fire became real and violent really spoke to me.
Hi Ms. Block!
I enjoy reading aboutt the books that you critique and write about.
We miss you a lot at school, Samihah
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