Rating 4/5

I love things that move you not because they’re sad but because they’re sweet. In this book a pretty, young woman Veronika decides to kill herself. There’s no tragedy compelling  her to do so it’s just the monotony of life…There’s nothing that she feels she can do to change the growing apathy of the world we live in .Her suicide fails and she is instead sent to a mental institution . She is told that her heart is weakened and that she will die soon. This Knowledge brings on a slew of different emotions & how she reacts to them is also influenced by the characters she meets.

It’s not really about the plot but rather about the epiphanies that different people have within the mental institution – the epiphanies that are triggered by different interactions with people. There are a lot of profound realizations that people have about life and that’s what makes this book so amazingly enlightening – to the point that it leads us to question our own decisions. It’s an uneasy feeling but it’s a healthy one.

These are the thoughts I took away from the book:

• There’s very little that’s insane or not insane. Sanity is a matter of consensus in the sense that a bunch of people decided that this was the way to do things, this decision was more or less arbitrary and after time anyone who strayed from that decision was considered off or even mad.
• Not taking risk’s in life, not following your passion – that’s the real insanity. Without following what a person really wants he/she surrenders to a life that’s monotonous and that’s without ups and downs and doesn’t matter if he lives or dies.

• We are so obsessed with our fears that they almost paralyze us to the point that we stop actually living
• And this is one of the excerpts that I loved: “is wanting to different a serious illness ?”

(This review was published in Issue 5 (June 2008) of Voice)