Review: made me think
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 02 28, 2014
What a beautiful dedication and  thoughts shared at the beginning of the book.The first chapter damn near broke my heart. How LCH has managed to write so eloquently, yet factually about such an emotional subject with clear personal touches really pricked at my eyes.Her main character is Kath, and Kath has terminal bowel cancer. The premise of the story is she is offered that elusive cure via a pod from the future, or does she?Some really great explanations of the torment that is simply waiting for a call back, a simple text message of hope.The way that LCH describes the horrific side effects of the chemo and how it wrecks your body; I was almost signing up for the The Moon Walk.The descriptive writing style of LCH goes into overdrive as she puts you at the door to a church, then inside  and finally next to the “pod” of dreams.  I found the odd bit of dark humour in this book and this was one of those times as Kathy starts to think that Janie, her potential savior, is a mercy serial killer!As if poor Kathy doesn’t have enough in her own life to deal with she desperately tries to help her childhood friend, who has debilitating depression. Surely that should be the other way around? Another reason this book feels so real life and not just a story, nothing is perfect.This element of the book really made me think about disease and all its forms. Just because we can’t see the disease does it make it not real? I was very torn as to which friend was suffering more.An “interesting” observation regarding cancer diagnosis and its treatment that I had never thought of was the impact getting well has on your family and friends. What others try to shield from you as you are the “sick” one.Kath constantly struggles with not being able to fix, cure or care enough about those around her to the point where I was getting annoyed at Kath expecting the pod to fix all the problems not only in her life but in the world, some things should not be fixed.But is cancer the cause of that selfishness or is it just life?, do we need permission to love our selves first in life?As things start to build to a crescendo after an interfering husband puts a spanner in the works, all hope seems at a loss, the tension continues to mount as it’s a race to the finish line, but which finish line?There are some deaths along the way, some threats and lots of high emotion. I was caught on the edge of my seat for most of this book.The ending was a bit quick for me, I could see where the author wanted to go, just think it could have gone a few more chapters into explaining things. But sometimes your own imagination is better, and in this case, only a maybe from me?Not sure what genre this book comes under, its harrowing, informative, a touch of sci-fi and a touch of horror.BUT it is a book NOT be missed.