Review of: Impulse

Perfection, is ugly. It is unobtainable, for everything changes so even the idea or notion of perfect will change. But there will always be those striving for it.

After reading the book Impulse by Ellen Hopkins I couldn’t help but think this. The book, with vivid characters written in verse novel, (written in poetry form rather than prose) delves into the lives of maturing teenagers in a mental ward sounding like a nice thirst-quenching retirement home: Aspen Springs. The book holds the reader’s attention by switching-but staying in first person-to the thoughts of one of the three main characters: Tony, Conner, and Vanessa, all   had attempted suicide. The “cure” for each involves drugs, group therapy, and individual therapy by trying to coup with the problems hidden in their past.

Ellen Hopkins has written poetry and several nonfiction novels. She explores everything from belief and belief in love to nature and nurture. The reader witnesses pain and the reason the characters may strive for it, just to feel. There is beautiful imagery and wonderful rhymes spaced throughout the book. The book Impulse has more than 600 pages! But when written with five or less stanzas a page it would take a fast reader a day and a half ride on a quiet el train to finish. Hopkins is great with not only descriptive imagery, but conversations and flashbacks to painful memories in the characters past as they try to change themselves in the present. Try.

And why I began with thinking perfection is ugly, is because of the strive in some of the character’s lives to be perfect and perfect in the way others want them to be. Some strive for perfection without wondering what that would entail and what cost that may come by. If one strives to do what they love and achieve what they want, then maybe that is perfect, perfectly understanding one self and their place in this world.

Ellen Hopkins has written other verse novels and New York Times Bestsellers like: Crank, Glass, and Identical; and also Burned and Tricks. She has a way with words and the form on the page like that only seen in writers when they try a new style, but this she is mastering and exploring as she goes.

Impulse is a brutally graphic and beautifully constructed long short story that discomforts the reader when in the mental ward, and yet that sickening prison becomes a home where all are accepted for being fucked up and not just pretending they aren’t messed up. Again, it is a quick and beautiful read, I highly recommend it! In two weeks check for my review of Aristotle’s Politics.

Justin Vaisnor

Review of: Fahrenheit 451

You are reading-that’s a good start-but you are reading a review on the book Fahrenheit 451 which features a world eerily similar to our own with one major difference-books are banned. Nearly all reading is banned and books are good for one thing only, burning-burning with the houses they were hidden in.

            Ray Bradbury’s book Fahrenheit 451, written more than 50 years ago, is still relevant and defiant against censorship even today. The book follows a fireman whose job is to burn rather than put fires out. With striking similarities to George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where books have a profound position in the societies of each: Orwell-individual thought and books are banned, Huxley-there is seemingly no need for reading with so much pleasure and perfection, and in Bradbury’s-books are not needed as they cause thoughts and open a person to the actual real world around them; a world suffering and moving through motions without love and freedom and individualistic expression-which can be said about all three. It is perhaps a world we all fear.

            Ray Bradbury has a heart for freedom of written word, for fantastical and beautifully constructed images that must not-for they cannot-be changed; otherwise one is delving into the mind of the author and changing the very thought they had formed, a thought that is and was undeniably there. A book can be edited, something Ray is wholeheartedly against (and I wholeheartedly agree with him), but it would then lose it’s essence, it’s reason for being a book. Books are stories, thoughts, voices speaking through history and time to the audience here and not yet to come. They reach through to touch hearts and minds to bend and reshape so as we can shape our own. Changing one word the author wrote and was therefore printed, is changing our very existence. Which is exactly what the firemen were meant to do, to edit inside this fearfully split and isolated world.

            The fireman the reader follows in this fascinating novel is Guy Montag. Fireman of ten years, Guy never questioned his life or his reason for burning these books on midnight runs until he meets a young thoughtful girl, enchantingly free and loving-by far not carefree but possesses a great amount of pensiveness-because of her Guy finally felt accepted by someone in a society that follows motions-without logical emotional reasoning-but with logical apathy in order to silence dissent and disagreement. Guy later runs into an old university professor who helps him dream and take action toward a future where people can think for themselves and feel an ounce of worth once again. But Guy has a terrible secret, that if found out, would ruin his plans and his world.

            This book, honestly, is a good read. One that I look back and wished I read early in my life but at least I’ve had the privilege to read it at all without a word changed or cut out. It is short and took me only three or so days to read. I highly recommend it to those that have also taken a liking to the other books previously mentioned in this review (1984 and Brave New World). And if you have read this book but not any of the other two, then I highly recommend those! Thanks for reading! My next review will be in two weeks and over Ellen Hopkins New York Times bestseller: Impulse. Look for Dave's review next Monday on A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway!