Very similar to her other novel (Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name) but not as poetic." ( )

Vendela Vida is an amazingly talented writer and this novel, her first but read after I had purchased and enjoyed her second, is wonderful and I devoured it in less than a day.

Ellis, from San Francisco, is 21 and living in New York, attending college and working part time as a teachers assistant. One day while walking in the park opposite her apartment she is held at gunpoint but manages to escape unharmed. Emotionally injured though she seeks counselling, avoids her boyfriend and other suitors and feels as though her life has been halted. A week long trip to the Phillipeans with her mother to assist in a medical charity helps her to gain some perspective on her life and the strange assortment of friends and family who populate it.

Reading this has officially put Vendala Vida firmly onto my favourite authors list. She knows how to write a compelling story with likable, believable characters who have thier quirks and flaws but seem entirely natural rather than manufactured. I loved the story, loved the writing, loved Ellis and her weird and wonderful friends and family and completely loved the book. ( )

And Now You Can Go
Vendela Vida
New York: Anchor Books, 2003

What a life-affirming book!

Ellis, the protagonist in Vendela Vida's book, has a profoundly disturbing experience: a man grabs her in a park, telling her he is going to kill himself, and he does not want to go alone; he is taking her with him. Ellis, trying to convince him there is much to live for, recites poetry to him, since it is art and poetry that transform lives. After persuading the would-be killer and suicide to accompany her to a bookstore, he lets her go. Ellis, understandably shaken by the experience, stops functioning as she did before. She sees her attacker in all men. She gets episodes of excruciating psychic pain; her senses, especially smell, work on overload. Her relationships, with her mother, sister, friends, but especially her father, are all reexamined. But eventually, from her frozen state, come the glimmerings of understanding. After a mission trip accompanying her mother to the Philippines, she sees "mother's laughing – her mouth falling far open -- and Freddie's bouncing in her red sneakers... it's too much love to handle at once" (137).

The community is mobilized to find her attacker. By the time he is found by vigilantes, Ellis has moved on; she has "all forgiven him". Through her attack she is brought to an epiphany, to forgiveness. She can look at the men who have hurt her, by extension at all men, who have all hurt someone, and “forgive each man as he entered the door to his home” (189). Vendela Vida has written a beautiful, wise book. ( )

http://hollybooknotes.blogspot.com/20... ( )

LOVED this one. It's a quick read, very simply written, but engaging and enjoyable. Anyone who's lived through any sort of potentially life-threatening trauma should be able to relate all too well to this book, especially its straightforward descriptions of some of the (seemingly) bizarre things the main character does to try to deal with the shock of being held at gunpoint. Definitely a new favourite. ( )