Review: " This is About The Word " LOVE"............
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 17, 2013
I had to actually read this short story twice, not because I didn't understand it, but trying to find the purpose of writing it half way, instead of turning this into a full length excellent, literary novel it could have been...The story is told through the narrator, who is a young Asian woman, the main character and that's all you get..No description of her, or any kind of background history is given..But, yet the story stuck with me afterwards,  analyzing it, so to get it out of my head I had to write the review, maybe that was the pupose after all..Because this story left me feeling all kinds of emotions in the end...So, the second time I read it, because of my professional background I decided to approach this story in a different way..I pretended that I had just found someone's lost diary or journal on the street..I opened it to find identification, or a return address and there was none...But, being curious I glimpsed inside this young woman's private thoughts, where on paper it was the only place she could reveal her true self.........This young woman has no identity because from the journal pages you get a sense that she feels invisible to the world....She is basically a loner and is incapable of feeling love..She feels depressed, hopeless, repulsed by human contact, some what rebellious, and feels the world is bleak..You see two days into her life as she volunteers with a group to pass out plain bag sandwiches to the homeless...This is a self test to see if she is even capable of caring for anyone or anything...She realizes the test is a failure, and gives up..Once her boyfriend calls and says one word, that will be the trigger........In the end the damn will break, and the floodwaters will rise, as the young woman is drowning in self destruction..For readers out there this is a very serious, sad, quirky, thought provoking, story...By the end, I felt this could have been a female version of, author, J. D. Salinger's, "The Catcher in the Rye", that was mandatory reading back when I was in high school......****This author has amazing potential, and is an excellent writer****** I hope someday to come across her name again...............