Author/Editor: Celia Ruiz (no website found)
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is reward aplenty!
This book promised more than it delivered. It felt more like a greeting card than a book. I initially thought that this might be amusing or entertaining, but for me, it wasn't. It’s simply a description of a few people who have problems resulting from poor memory, and it’s sad, but ironically, the stories are not memorable! I'm not sure what the writer was trying to achieve with this, but whatever it was appears to have failed with me. I think a full-length story by this writer, who definitely has heart and soul, would have been a better read.
One of the things I rail against in books, mostly graphic novels (and this applies, of course, only to those which run to print versions), is the sad waste of paper. It sounds like a huge insult to describe a book as a waste of paper, and I don’t mean it like that in this case, where a certain "look and feel" is sought, but I have to say there was a huge amount of white space in this one, and I'm not convinced that it was all necessary.
Each person's 'story' is told here in a fixed format, no matter what the story is. First there was a completely blank page, then a page which was blank save for a small oval image of the person (head and torso), which was all but lost in the middle of the paper. This was followed by a page containing only three or four lines of sad text, and finally the story was concluded with a full page image.
The book format is quite small, so perhaps this isn’t as wasteful as I'm making it sound, but still the first eight pages of it were almost all white space. I know it can be necessary, and I know there are publishing conventions as one commenter delighted in pointing out to me, but guess what? Does the fact that women never used to have the vote mean that insane convention should still hold today? Do 'rules' forced upon publishers by old technology mean that we must still embrace those today when technology is light years away from what it was when those rules were created? Not for me it doesn't.
These things are conventions, not laws of physics. Does the fact that Big Publishing™ has made declarations mean that we all of us must bow down before them? I refuse. Trees are more important than conventions. They're more important than the Library of Congress. Screw convention. Embrace trees.
Oh, and I can't recommend this book.
