Judith’s review of Hope(less)
Life should be simple. At least that’s what KJ believes as he begins his senior year of high school. Until, he meets Lorraine. They fall in love and after a tragic accident, they run. With two bus tickets not enough to escape their agony, the two teenagers are found by strangers who become their guardians in Philadelphia. Eventually finding a place to live in New York, they drift further apart through the passing years. Losing their family once again, KJ and Lorraine must find their way back home before losing each other — all that keeps them alive.
Once in awhile I am called upon to review a book that is just really difficult to read and hard to understand. That is not to say that I don’t enjoy the challenge. Because I read so many books I get really weary of books that are predictable and whose plots and characters could easily have been cut and pasted from other stories. That is certainly not the case here. And I hope I don’t discourage anyone from reading this book. But I stick with my original statement that this is not an easy book to read.
The opening prologue-type chapter is still a mystery to me. Perhaps when I re-read this book–and I do plan to re-read this book in the hopes that more of its action and characters make sense for me–I will come to some kind of understanding why children had a gun and were shooting a person they obviously despised. How that fit into the greater story is still not know to me.
In any event, the characters of this story are just two–Lorraine and KJ. They met and fell in love during their senior year in high school and both were aspiring musicians with great talent and some fairly hefty aspirations. Even though they became emotionally involved, musically they were still competitors and that kept them working hard to best one another. Yet in the midst of the flush of their teen love and the upcoming graduation, a terrible accident occurred at Lorraine’s home involving a terrible misunderstanding by her father, a man who had slowly but surely become unhinged because of his wife’s terrible death due to a gang rape. He had become an alcoholic and in the midst of his drunken haze, he accidentally severed Lorraine’s hand from her arm, attacked KJ, and in trying to save KJ, Lorraine sank the cleaver into her father’s body, killing him. Believing her life had be changed for the worse, Lorraine left the hospital where she was recovering and not wanting to be without her, KJ left with her. Pooling their limited resources they set out for an unknown destination, and ended up living on the streets for years together.
There is the sense of a Greek tragedy about this story–it just didn’t ever seem to get any better. KJ and Lorraine stayed together and managed to survive together, but there were no demonstrations of their love. All their energy went toward just finding a place to sleep, staying warm in winter, and eating. Yet through all those years Lorraine held on to her trumpet, and KJ lugged his sax case everywhere. They didn’t use drugs although Lorraine’s arm never really healed as it should have and they had to find medical care through free clinics. It was only after many years that she began to realize that finally they had begun growing apart and if she really loved KJ, she needed to set him on a different path and that involved getting him back playing his sax. This she did and with the money from his first gig, she sent him away.
This story is, at its core, a tale of hope wrapped in a blanket of hopelessness. It is about survival–but at the cost that KJ and Lorraine almost lost themselves as well as any sense of place in the world. Yet in some strange and wonderful way, their love survived. And their music, while it lay buried for years, was always there, and ultimately KJ had to admit that his love affair with his music had only become secondary when he fell in love with Lorraine. That they played for and to each other become more and more evident, even when they finally split up.
This is not a HEA book but there is a very positive ending to the story. It almost felt as if it was not really an ending but a beginning for each of them, still knowing that somewhere they were playing their music and they were loving each other. The writing style lends itself to that sense that there is always something deeper going on, but it is not a style that is really easy to read. And I still haven’t figured out the significance of those prologue-type introductions to each section. It is a disharmonious story that pushes and pulls and jars the expectations of the reader. One is constantly surprised at what happens and where the action of the story will point. One the one hand I was ill at ease because parts of the book remained a mystery to me. On the other hand I was deeply moved by the experience of these two gifted people. Undelying all the human elements of the story was that sense of Fate or Faith–a Providential plan of some sort. Lorraine believed that while KJ never really worked that out.
This is a challenge novel but worth the effort. It is not going to be a book that will lend itself to snuggly afghans and hearth and wingback chairs. It will be a book some will read with the determination to get the story and to ferret out its deeper meanings. It is an emotional and intellectual exercise that must be undertaken not by the faint of heart, but by a reader who wants a literary prime rib rather than a marshmallow.
I give this novel a rating of 3.75 out of 5.
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This book is available from Grey Line Press. You can buy it here