go straight to the bookstore and buy these books!

Or go straight to the library and check them out! Or…

This month I’ve read two books that are among the best books I’ve ever read and I’m full of gratitude. Both of them were a story within a story, both written by two of my favorite authors, Matt Haig and Fredrick Backman. They touch on the mystical, magical, metaphorical things I believe in, and involve family (mostly the family we aren’t related to) connection, and Love.

Matt Haig has written The Life Impossible, about the island of Ibiza, and what happens when a 72-year-old former math teacher, Grace Winters, has been given a house there by a woman she befriended in her youth and had never seen again. After losing her son and her husband, her life seems meaningless and emotionally arid, and she feels compelled to go, to see the house and to perhaps sell it. 

Once there, she encounters strange water in a jar and is warned not to go see a diver named Alberto because he’s suspected of murdering her benefactress. Of course, she does not heed that advice and learns the water and the light it manifests is something amazing found in a section of the sea. That special water and light is called La Presencia and is believed by Alberto and others to be an alien, healing being. It seeks out Grace when Alberto takes her to the area where it exists and it gives her special powers. 

“And once I’d had my contact with La Presencia, it was as though I was waking from a slumber, leaving a cocoon and flying into a new kind of sentience where I wasn’t just formed of Everything but could see and understand it too. And it felt entirely ridiculous and perfectly logical all at once. It was, I suppose, marginally less ridiculous than being born. Coming from nothing into something is probably even more of a miracle, but when everyone has the same miracle, you start to devalue it. It is simple supply and demand…I was on a completely new planet. It was technically the same planet, of course. The same Spanish island here on earth…You see, if you want to visit a new world, you don’t need a spacecraft. All you need to do is change your mind.”

This book is written on the conceit that a former student has written to her asking for help because he feels lost and he remembers how she’d helped him when he was a student. Her response is this story of what has happened to her in life before and during her time in Ibiza.

I loved the sci-fi, fantasy, magical realisim content in this book, mostly because I believe in things others find impossible. Haig makes this content actually believeable and that what  happens makes people find each other, connect, and help others is even better.

I also appreciated Matt Haig’s author segment explaining how he chose Ibiza for a location and how it factored in his own life dealing with psychological problems similar to Grace’s and the student’s. 

If any of what I ‘ve written sounds good to you, please know also that the writing itself is lovely and I had to stop often just to enjoy that alone. I started reading Matt Haig’s works with The Midnight Library and I’m going now to order every last one of his prior novels because he feels like a kindred spirit. 

I followed that novel with Fredrick Backman’s latest novel, My Friends. It is a novel with the themes of Art, Love, and Family, especially family that grows from friendship. This is a novel, the beauty of which made me tear up almost every other page. I love Backman’s style using humor and displaying the depth of understanding of human behavior and how we interact and why. I’ve read every book he’s written for a reason. He packs all of life’s events and our responses to them, even farts, into every chapter. You laugh, cry, shout and recognize yourself on every page. 

As one Amazon reviewer wrote, “This is a story within a story about four epic amazing friends and the summer when they were 14 years old and an art competition. It’s a story about love, loss, friendships, found family, heartbreak, self-identity, and so so much more. It is not for the weak of heart and may be triggering for some. Please check the trigger warnings if needed…How this man can weave humor, hijinks, laughter, sadness, depression, and utterly gut-wrenching scenarios and ideas, sometimes all of the latter in one paragraph is truly beyond me.”

The main character, Louisa, who has lived in foster homes all her life, possesses a postcard of a painting that a deceased loved one has given her and she wants to know more about the painting. She travels to see it and commits an act of vandalism with spray paint that connects her to the three children at the end of the dock in the painting. She is an entirely disagreeable person but in spite of that, the artist of the painting tells her she is “one of us,” and unbeknownst to her, upon his death, bequeaths the painting to her. Louisa doesn’t want it because she doesn’t trust herself with it and she tries to give it back. 

None of the kids in the painting, nor the artist as well, had good home lives and so they became family for each other, bonded by love. They knew that the one who was an artist was not long for this world if they did nothing, so the naughtiest of them, who loves the strongest, finds a painting competition and demands the artist paint a picture for it. No one has any painting supplies and so they all devise plans to obtain them which involves many shenanigans. 

As an adult, one of them travels with Louisa as she goes to their hometown to learn more about them and why they are in the painting. These two, who differ in age and personalities, share stories about their lives, their friendships, and the love that came from those friendships. Bad things happen in every chapter, but then good things happen that overshadow the bad.

This book is a paean to the absolute necessity of Art and artists, the existence of which keeps us alive. As one older artist tells the boy artist who is doubting his own talent: “You’re an artist if you create something! You’re an artist if you don’t see the world the way it is, if you hate white walls! No one else decides what art is, no one can stop you loving whatever you like, the cynics and critics can have control of all the other crap on the planet…but they can’t decide how hard your heart beats! Become whatever you want, but don’t become one of them. Art is a fragile enough light as it is. It can be blown out by a single sigh. Art needs friends, with our bodies against the wind and our hands cupped around the flame, until it’s strong enough to burn brightly with its own power. Until it’s an inferno. Unstoppable.” 

There’s another character added in part-way, there are twists and turns, and yet you end up right where you ought to be at the end. It’s a beautiful, beautiful novel and your heart will feel full after reading it. You might even think about all the people in your life that encouraged your dreams and made you feel important enough to be believed in.