Author: annsepstein@att.net

My Goodreads and Amazon review of Bewilderment by Richard Powers (Rating 4) – A Wild Ride Through Earth and Cosmos. Bewilderment by Richard Powers is a novel about loss — the loss of a parent, the feared loss of a child, the loss of earth’s ecosystem, the loss of an opportunity to explore distant realms. The title connotes confusion but is also an old term for returning to the wild. Grieving the death of his wife, an astrophysicist and father of a nine-year-old boy with over-diagnosed mental health problems tries to save his gifted but sensitive son without resorting to chemical treatments. Together they explore the wilds of nature, and the imagined wilds of far-off planets where life assumes many different forms. Powers poses parallel heartbreaking questions: Can a father avert the loss of his beloved child? Can humanity avert the loss of our earth? Mistakes are made. Some involve a brain-altering technology that Powers invents, not always convincingly. Others, wholly believable, evoke a parent’s desperate attempts to keep his unique but fragile child. As a fiction writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), one who prizes character development, I especially admire the authenticity of the father’s roller coaster emotions. Readers too are in for a wild and be-wildered ride through earth and cosmos.

An imaginative yet down-to-earth novel

Why writers read: “To read is to voyage through time.” – Carl Sagan

My Amazon and Goodreads reviews of I’m Never Fine: Scenes and Spasms on Loss by Joseph Lezza (Rating 5) – Tribute and Tirade. Joseph Lezza’s I’m Never Fine: Scenes and Spasms on Loss is a moving tribute to his late father, whose death from pancreatic cancer left his son bereft. It is also a tirade against the unjust and untimely death of a generous man on the cusp of finally enjoying the fruits of a hard-working life. Lezza struggles with his identity as a gay man, raised by devout parents in a Catholic Church that condemned who and what he was. An only child, the beneficiary of his parents’ unstinting love, Lezza was filled with guilt and remorse for having disappointed them. Reading about his journey from self-abasement to self-acceptance is painful, but ultimately redeeming. As a writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I was impressed by Lezza’s agility with language. His lesson on the meaning of “fine” (adjective, verb, and noun), rooted in the Latin “finis” or end, is a masterful discourse on its ambiguity; it can describe a state ranging from superb to barely tolerable, from being done with grief to utterly and finally dead to the world, like his father. Likewise, Lezza’s description of his reawakening is simultaneously surreal and wholly authentic. As an end-of-life doula, I value his unsparing description of dying, a process that can literally and figuratively strip away our humanity — unless we transform it. Lezza and his mother, backed by family, friends, and hospice, never let the ravages of cancer deprive a brave man of the dignity and adoration he deserves. Lezza’s ferocious yet funny memoir restores justice to his father and rewards his own talents as a writer.