CBR #5: Familiar, Robert Lennon

Who hasn't wanted a do-over? In theory. It's funny that I read this book now. It's a strange book. It's about a woman, Elisa, who is driving home from her annual visit to her son's graveside when everything changes. There's a crack in the mirror and a big boom and then somehow everything is changed.

There's no way to talk about this book without spoiling a couple of things, most of which you learn pretty early on, but not all of it... You're warned.

Elisa drives back home to her house to find her life as it would have been had her son not died. The very thing she wanted the most in the world, or did she? The book is interesting in the way Elisa reinserts her "self" into her "new" life, for a little while. It highlights how easy it is to go through the motions, how willing the people around us are to see what they want to see.  Or maybe it's commentary on how no one really knows anyone. Either way..

It gets a little weird towards the end, but I didn't really find myself caring.

The interesting thing is how Elisa struggles to reconcile what she thought she wanted then now that she actually has it, with what she wants now. Even when what she thinks is the worst event of her life is reversed, she still longs for the other life. That's the part of the book that really resonates. The attachment we get to our current state. How we stay, even in a bad place, because we know it. There might be something better out there, but we can't be sure, so we tread water licking our wounds rubbing up against the misery. Or worse yet, we get convinced that if that one thing hadn't happened everything would be better, but that thing did happen and so now here we are. Nothing to be done about it. So we tread water licking out wounds....

It's always easier to see this in other people's lives than our own, but this book makes you see the little glimmers, awareness threatens.

The book is sad.