Saturday, April 9, 2011

Book Review - Losing Michael Malone - Nicholas Kasunic


Title: Losing Michael Malone


Review:  I loved this book.  Reading about death and loss is nothing I enjoy and yet this book gave me hope in the future, even with the loss each member experienced.  The struggle this family goes through is heartbreaking and yet amazing.  Feeling for every one of the members of this family is easy, the writer makes you part of their lives and you want them to be happy, you want them to laugh, smile, and most of all enjoy each other.

Nicholas did a wonderful job of painting the lives of these people.  His words are beautifully constructed into a masterpiece that everyone should read and experience.   Love for each other helps each of them get through this loss and so many others they experience in life.  I don’t think I am expressing how much I loved this book; I want everyone I know to read it.  It’s short and sweet, believe me it will be worth your time to read it.  The pictures he brought into my head made the story alive for me, the heartache and love etched across my mind brought me to tears.  This is a moving story of the love and loss one family experiences, each person feeling something different and yet so much the same.  Read this book!!!

One of my favorite lines from the book: “You guide a child through life and cultivate a proper upbringing; you help mold an entire human being, a person capable of doing anything.  You have bred pain and suffering, struggle and hardship.  There are no more pleasant anecdotes and honest lies that delay the mockery of reality.  There is only this hurt- an infection of emotional codependency manifested in parent and offspring that never separates.  Some call it love.”  This is from the mother, Kathryn, she struggles with her love for her children and hurts at the things they must go through in this life. Her daughter Emma is who she is thinking about at this part in the story.  She loves her family deeply and yet struggles herself with many things she has no control over.

Each of us struggles with something that makes us feel less than everyone else and yet we are all so much alike.  Embrace your life experiences and reach out to those around you.  Read this book, I don’t know if I’ve said that enough, you will love it.

Publisher: Tate Publishing (March 1, 2011)

ISBN: 1617393754

Copyright: 2011

Pages:  136

Quick Review: 5 stars (out of 5)

Why I Read It:  I thought it sounded interesting.

Where I Obtained the Book:  I won this book on another book blog site, Feeding My Book Addition(read their review of the book.)  I do not know the author and I received no compensation for this review.

Synopsis:  Suddenly, everything in life was no longer a validation of hope, a confirmation of being, a beckoning of an omniscient smile as if all that had occurred in the world had fallen like dominoes in order to bow to a particular moment or succumb to, by all other means, a nonsensical realization. The charm of life was no more than a trail of seduction that birthed its most prized possessions of reality hurt, terror, suffering, impurity, hopelessness. The unknown. In Losing Michael Malone, five characters search for happiness in a time of suffering. Emma is blind to the sunshine that gleams around her each and every day. Maddie witnesses a drained and exhausted marriage. Jack is without solitude in a life of inner conflict and self-loathing. Love and compassion rip and tear through the life of Kathryn. Michael hurts too much to feel anything. Through all of the pain of passion and disease, this cast of characters is on a collision course towards each other no matter how much they'd like to run away. It all contributes to the narrative of what we refer to as life. Nothing keeps us from it, and everything tries to take it away.

Author Biography:   At 20 years old, Nicholas Kasunic is finding his voice as a writer. A native of Pittsburgh, PA, he attends the University of Pittsburgh. Still a ways from a degree, he does claim expertise in pain as a result of his medical condition of CRPS. In lieu of succumbing to a dark and empty life, he uses his personal agony as a catalyst for his writing. Full of insight into both the positive and negative aspects of struggle, his work covers a spectrum of emotional responses to life.

In his first novel, Losing Michael Malone, Kasunic studies the subtle emotions of pain and all its friends-depression, disease, passion, love, guilt, self-loathing, disappointment -while chronicling five characters in their desperate search for meaning.

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