Review: Excellent mash up of genres.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 01 14, 2013
This book is a mash up of sci-fi, chick lit, romance, personal growth, friendship and returning to your roots. Right up my alley.Its about a fictional celebrity who, after nearly dying at the hands of a stalker, escapes LA and goes back home to the Midwest. She falls in love with a computer scientist who has invented a device that is better than any virtual reality available to date. The "Black box" is doing something they don't understand, and seems to randomly insert the user into a memory, with all of the sensory input of the original memory. In addition, all the associate feelings of that memory are also recovered. Amazing.The book is written completely out of order. At first, this was hard to get through. I gave up a few times, and then went back to it. But once I understood what was going on and became accustomed to the writing style of the author, probably a quarter way through the book, I had a hard time putting it down.The themes of love, friendship and overcoming obstacles is readily apparent and stays with the reader. My eyes welled up when reading some of the more emotional passages. Perhaps my own struggle right now with my health had something to do with it. I identify completely with the main character and her struggles.Also, I had never considered what it would be like to be a major celebrity. I am not someone that follows pop culture at all. I rarely see movies, and barely pay attention to TV (unless its Mad Men or The Walking Dead). I have no desire to read about someone else's personal life. But through this book, it occurred to me that it can be difficult to have a "public persona" and have your every move watched and documented. I also never realized how difficult it can be to "make it" in Hollywood. I enjoyed the little snippets the author included about some real-life major celebrities in relation to his main character.I consider myself to have an above average vocabulary, but while reading this book, I was thrilled to have a dictionary available at the touch of a screen.Overall, an amazing, thought and emotion provoking, fantastic literary work. Definitely recommended to anyone who likes these kinds of "uncategorizable" mash ups of several different genres.