C.E. Clayton, official author website
  • Home
  • About the Author
    • C.E. Clayton
    • Requesting Book Reviews
  • List of Works
    • Starfish Ink >
      • Eerden Novels
      • Eerden Novellas
    • The Monster of Selkirk Series
    • Freebies and collectors editions for TMOS
    • Other Published Works
  • Musings
    • What I'm Reading
    • Blog
  • Newsletter
    • Giveaways
    • Clayton's Super Friends
  • Members Only

What I'm Reading


Want to get more reviews and bookish giveaways? Be sure to sign up for my Book Club!
Sign up for the Book Club now!

Life And Other Near-Death Experiences; Camille Pagan

8/17/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
“Life and Other Near-Death Experiences” is the rather humorous journey one woman takes, both literally and figuratively, when she discovers she has cancer. I know it sounds weird, a book that’s meant to be a funny account of a woman diagnosed with a rare cancer while her marriage dissolves around her? But it’s true! Often these kinds of books (that a lot of people call chik-lit or women’s fiction, but I don’t like those “titles”) follow a similar format that is very Lifetime Movie: something truly awful happens, and then someone makes it worse, and then the main character goes on a path of panic fueled self-discovery. Which is what the main character, Libby does. But Pagan writes it in a way that has a unique brand of humor that won’t leave you emotionally drained and devastated at the end of every chapter.

Cancer is a sensitive subject, so this is one of those books that, by its very nature, you are either going to love or hate. If cancer is a trigger for you, then do yourself a favor, and don’t read this book. The way Pagan handles the subject matter may be offensive if the light-hearted tone when it comes to cancer and cancer treatment is not one you agree with, or appreciate, which is totally fine, just save yourself the time and skip this short, faced-paced book.

Ok so, back to the book at hand. I found Pagan’s writing of Libby and the situation she found herself in to be genuinely entertaining, she deals with traumatic experiences in a way that I think a lot of us would, whether we would admit it or not—she runs away. But this isn’t a denial kind of run away (well, it is a bit), it’s more of, if cancer is going to steal her life, she is going to live her last months like a Spanish Soap Opera; on a beach in Puerto Rico where she falls in love, and rediscovers the will to live.

Pagan does a great job of writing Libby as this spastic—and frankly manic—woman when everything starts going wrong, and the author’s writing style fits with that mentality. I never laughed out loud at any parts, but I was smiling and felt like I had just run a marathon with how quickly Libby decides to change pretty much everything about her life early on. Then as Libby “matures” and comes to accept what’s happening, let’s go, and rediscovers a will to fight and live for the things she loves, the tempo of the book seems to slow as Libby accepts the things around her, and begins hunkering down. It was a subtle shift, one I didn’t fully appreciate until a day after I finished the book. That doesn’t mean that, at times, I wasn’t super annoyed by Libby, and how she treated people around her, but I thought it was genuine to her character so it became easier to forgive.

I won’t spoil anything, but I wasn’t a huge fan of the ending as it seemed to undermine major plot points the book brings up early on, and sometimes the characters felt more like caricatures then fully fleshed people, and they ended up having a diction pattern that made most of them sound the same. And for as minor as that sounds, I found these elements spoiling a lot of the emotional journey and believability I had in either the people Pagan introduces the reader (and Libby) to, or the overall situation. But, given cancer is one of those topics that is so easy to make overly melodramatic because it’s “easy” to do, I appreciated an author trying to do something different with the otherwise extremely heavy subject matter, and for that, I give this book a solid 4 stars.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Click the book images to see them on Amazon!

    C.E.'s bookshelf: currently-reading

    The Night Bird
    The Night Bird
    by Brian Freeman
    tagged: currently-reading
    A Boy From the Chesapeake
    A Boy From the Chesapeake
    by Larry Roszkowiak
    tagged: book-review-requests and currently-reading
    The Mine
    The Mine
    by John A. Heldt
    tagged: book-review-requests and currently-reading
    September Sky
    September Sky
    by John A. Heldt
    tagged: book-review-requests and currently-reading
    Made Men: An Urban Fantasy Novel
    Made Men: An Urban Fantasy Novel
    by Seth Creamer
    tagged: book-review-requests and currently-reading

    goodreads.com

    RSS Feed

    Categories

    All
    Action
    Adventure
    Anthologies
    Christian
    Contemporary
    Crime Drama
    DNF
    Dystopian
    Fantasy
    Fiction
    Graphic Novel
    Historical Fiction
    Horror
    Humor
    Literature
    Memoir
    Middle Grade
    Mystery
    Mythology
    New Adult
    Non Fiction
    Non-Fiction
    Novella
    Paranormal
    Poetry
    Romance
    Science Ficton
    Short Stories
    Steampunk
    Thriller
    True Crime
    Urban Fantasy
    Western
    Young Adult
    Zombie

    Upcoming reviews

    The Squire's Tale
    Division of the Marked
    Night Watch
    Hatter
    The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
    The Blade Itself
    Dealing with Dragons
    Harbinger
    Over Sea, Under Stone
    Neverwhere
    Demon's Prize
    Terra Obscura: Volume 1
    The Thousand Names
    The Name of the Wind
    The Thorn of Emberlain
    The Time Traveler's Wife
    Babayaga
    The Goldfinch
    Wake Up, Sir!
    Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood

Support

Privacy Policy
© COPYRIGHT 2015. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
  • Home
  • About the Author
    • C.E. Clayton
    • Requesting Book Reviews
  • List of Works
    • Starfish Ink >
      • Eerden Novels
      • Eerden Novellas
    • The Monster of Selkirk Series
    • Freebies and collectors editions for TMOS
    • Other Published Works
  • Musings
    • What I'm Reading
    • Blog
  • Newsletter
    • Giveaways
    • Clayton's Super Friends
  • Members Only