Review of THE IMPOSSIBLE KNIFE OF MEMORY by Laurie Halse Anderson, the Tucson Festival of Books, and MORE!

IMG_0567_2 So all that Justine and I have been talking about for basically the past year is the Tucson Festival of Books coming up next weekend. We got to stay overnight in a nice hotel and go to a free book festival without kids! When does this ever happen? Never! Well, except the Tucson Festival of Books. Hence, our excitement! One of the main authors we were so excited to meet is Laurie Halse Anderson, author of the acclaimed Speak, which is next on my to-read list. I decided to start with her newest novel, The Impossible Knife of Memory. You may remember this as the book I voted for at our latest book club meeting but Gone Girl was chosen instead. Here is the synopsis from its Goodreads page:

For the past five years, Hayley Kincaid and her father, Andy, have been on the road, never staying long in one place as he struggles to escape the demons that have tortured him since his return from Iraq. Now they are back in the town where he grew up so Hayley can attend school. Perhaps, for the first time, Hayley can have a normal life, put aside her own painful memories, even have a relationship with Finn, the hot guy who obviously likes her but is hiding secrets of his own.

Will being back home help Andy’s PTSD, or will his terrible memories drag him to the edge of hell, and drugs push him over?

This book throws you right in the heat of things right away, there’s no comfort level. She’s at a school she hates with a complicated home life and no friends. Sounds awful, doesn’t it? And it is, for her, but Anderson gave Hayley a very funny voice that does more than simply lighten the mood, she actually becomes bitterly comical. Her inner dialogue about the “zombies” at her school was hilarious and something I would bet a lot of bookish-types could relate to.

Well, correct my “no-friends” comment above, she has one friend named Gracie. I liked that each character in this book had his or her own issues, own struggles they were going through. For each of them it revolved around their parents, an interesting real-life process that I believe all young adults go through but isn’t discussed often enough. In fact, it was Hayley’s friendships in the book that cause me to give this book 3 stars instead of 4 or 5. Anderson creates all of these different complex storylines with Gracie and with Finn and towards the end of the book they seemed to just… drop off. Especially with Gracie. At the end of the book everything with Hayley’s dad comes to a head and I understand that it needs its own room for that all to breathe but the rest of the book felt unresolved and unbalanced. That threw me.

I think that one of the most fascinating parts of transitioning into adulthood is learning how to relate to your parents as an adult. You have to develop a friendship with your parents that exists outside of the strict parent-child area. I’m grateful I have this, but for many this is impossible (or not possible until many many hours of therapy are completed, ha!) if their parents didn’t make good choices. When you’re a child you often see your parents through rose-colored glasses but as you get older those glasses come off and you have to see them for the people they are. What an adjustment!

Laurie Halse Anderson with Bill Konigsburg, author of “Openly Straight”

For Hayley, it was dealing with her dad’s PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. I am very glad that Anderson wrote this book because, to my knowledge, there aren’t many other mainstream books that deal with this so honestly, and this perfectly goes into one of the highlights of meeting Laurie Halse Anderson at the Tucson Festival of Books this past weekend. The first panel we went to was called “Don’t Tell Me What NOT To Read: Teens & Censorship” and had a great panel of authors: Matt de la Pena, Laurie Halse Anderson, and Chris Crutcher. Matt de la Pena had this great GREAT quote he stole from Junot Diaz:

“You guys know about vampires?” Diaz asked. “You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist? And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might seem themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.”

Doesn’t that give you chills? I’m going to read every book I read now with this lense, thankful for each and every character authors create because for at least someone they will be a home and a refuge. A reassurance that they are okay and that everything else will be okay. And now I’m crying.

What is one of your favorite books, or one of the most relatable characters?