Week #02 - The Boy ¦ High Hopes

This weeks book, The Boy by Lara Santoro. I like the book. Nothing especially new but a good story with an ending, thank god. Anna is trying to to get her life back on track, after a failed marriage, alcoholism, little work and a child she basically didn't like. Anna tries in her 'new life' to make everything better but the problem was that Anna brought back herself which was the reason she disappeared in the first place. It is a brave novel. Issues of trust, selfishness, abandonment. Lara Santoro gives us a flawed woman in Anna, a woman who wants it all but doesn't know her boundaries, her responsibilities. When she does have it all she destroys it. We never find out why!

As I said I liked it but there are so many things wrong. Firstly, none of the characters outside Anna feel real and Anna is a most horrible person. There is Eva, Anna's 8-year-old daughter. She was basically abandoned by Anna during her infant years as Anna was too self-absorbed to care for her.  With Anna gone, Eva had to grow up fast but not so that she has the mind of an eighteen-year old. She flies to different sides of the world by herself. She says things like

"Everyone has a first memory".
"It's like me going out with a four-year old."
"He's Richard's son and Richard's your friend"

She is her mother's daughter and will grow up to be a mess like her, which is sad.

Second. Anna's friends, Mia and Ree are just as terrible and so shallow they wouldn't leave a shadow in the midday Australian sun. These characters may be real. I'm just glad I never met any of them in my life thus far.

Third. There should be laws against these sort of blurbs on books. You should be able to go back to the store and demand a refund as none of them bare any resemblance to the actual novel. Words like witty, sensuous, a coming-of-age story, masterful are misplaced in all the reviews here.

Esperanza, the gambling, drunken, street-fighting maid in the house is the only woman who's life we get any  glimpse into and understand why she is who she is. The drunken voice of reason.

As for the boy. Well men just out of their teens could be like this but again the confidence and conviction he has in himself is never explored. Anna falling for him is simply a case of the raging hormones in us all. Why is the Boy the focus of the novel I do not know. It's all about the women.

My favourite line.

"He's not mean, he's English. They have their hearts taken out at birth." 

3/5

I like Bruce Springsteen, but don't think of him as the god a lot of people do.Springsteen is very American. What he sings about is not matters of the global village but rather the US, more precisely a small part of the US, New Jersey. On one hand it can be wonderful, on the other boring and insular. With that said a review of High Hopes.

The first two tracks are outstanding, High Hopes and Harry's Place, and there are some other excellent tracks, The Ghost of Tom Joad, and some filler album tracks, that would appeal to the more fanatical of Springsteen followers, Hunter of Invisible Game. High Hopes, according to Wikipedia, is "a collection of cover songs, out-takes and re-imagined versions of tracks from past albums, EPs and tours." Springsteen himself said that the new music was "some of our best unreleased material from the past decade" and among the best of his writing and deserved a proper studio recording.

As I said I am not a big fan, although I have loved and still do, his stadium rock of the 70's and 80's. All told a good album but other than replaying the ones I like I don't think there are any 'high hopes' I will play this album in full again. But who knows what tomorrow brings ...

He does sound a bit like Chris Rea (or Chris Rea sounds a bit like Springsteen) on some especially Harry's Place and American Skin. This is not a criticise of either by the way. He may have sounded like this all his career.