Canada’s Annual Battle of the Books has as its theme this year “One Book to Move You.” This is the first of the five shortlisted books I’ve read so far. Since I have tickets to be in the studio audience once again this year, I want to read as many as I can before the CBC debate starts in March!
Like Educated, this is the story of an incredibly horrible and abusive upbringing. When Lindsay Wong, often troubled by dizziness and nausea, finally breaks away from her family and is living in NYC, she discovers that she actually has a neurological condition that has been causing her crippling symptoms–so, not the woo-woo after all. Lindsay Wong shares her dysfunctional family’s mental health struggles, where illness and weakness of any kind was nothing more than ghosts and demon possession.
It’s meant to be darkly comedic, but her writing style and humour just didn’t work for me. Even though she holds a BFA in creative writing from UBC in Vancouver (which she calls University of a Billion Chinese in Hongcouver) and an MFA from Columbia University, she says this in her acknowledgements, “Writing makes me want to gouge out my eyeballs.” Why would a writer say that when the book was meant to be cathartic? No doubt it was difficult for her to be honest about her upbringing and though I commend her for raising awareness within her culture about mental illness, I hesitate to recommend that this should win Canada Reads 2019 and be a book that all Canadians should read. Though the story is eye opening and harrowing, I found the book to be repetitive, disconnected, and just not that well written. It’s not even clear to me how she survived and how her obvious strength and resilience helped her overcome, which means all that remains is nothing more than a horrible story trying to be funny.
Joanne's Reading Blog 