Title: How To Buy a Love of ReadingAuthor: Tanya Egan Gibson
Pages: 389
Grade: A-
Summary: To Carley Wells, words are the enemy: the countless SAT lists from her tutor, the “fifty-seven pounds overweight” assessment from her personal trainer, and most of all, the “confidential” Getting To Know You assignment from her insane English teacher (whose literary terminology lessons include “Backstory is Afterbirth” and “Setting is Nobody’s Slut”). When he tells her parents that she’s answered “What is your favorite book?” with “Never met one I liked,” they become determined to fix what he calls her “intellectual impoverishment.” They will commission a book to be written for Carley that she’ll have to love—one that will impress her teacher and the whole town of Fox Glen with their family’s devotion to the arts. They will be patrons—the Medicis of Long Island. They will buy their daughter The Love Of Reading.
Impossible though it is for Carley to imagine ever loving words, she is in love with a young bibliophile who cares about them more than anything. Anything, that is, but a good bottle of scotch. Hunter Cay, Carley’s best friend and Fox Glen’s resident golden boy, is becoming a stranger to her as he drowns himself in F. Scott Fitzgerald, booze, and Vicodin.
When the Wellses move writer Bree McEnroy—author of a failed meta-novel about Odysseus’s voyages through the Internet—into their mansion to write Carley’s book, Carley’s sole interest in the project is its potential to distract Hunter from drinking and give them something to share. Instead, as Hunter’s behavior becomes erratic and dangerous, she finds herself drawn into the fictional world Bree has created and begins to understand for the first time the power of stories—those we read, those we want to believe in, and most of all, those we tell ourselves about ourselves. Stories powerful enough to destroy a person.
Or save her.
Review: How do you buy a love of reading? Well, I think buying this book would be a very nice start.
I was actually very skeptical when I started this book, I'm not going to lie. It took me a long time to get through the first half, just because of how hesitant I was. I had read one bad review on it and thus, I was scared! Now I know that maybe that wasn't my best approach.
Because let me tell you, it was mind-shattering.
I absolutely adore books that are intellectual and make me think for once. I'm all for the mushy romance nonsense, but books that explore my mind are so wonderful. And that was exactly what How To Buy a Love of Reading did. And I'm really not kidding. This book rendered me helpless for nearly 10 minutes just because I was thinking about everything the author was telling me. Or not telling me!
Has that ever even happened to you? A book is just so good that you just fall into it?
And being in Carley and Hunter's world made me feel blessed for everything I have. I think I would have been destroyed if I had to go through everything they endured. At times, I was actually scared for them! I was utterly hypnotized by their lifestyle. All I can say is, thank god for my nonchalant suburban lifestyle.
All I can leave you with is this:
This book is not a story. It is an experience.
