Absolutely Normal Chaos, by Sharon Creech
Like many young adult novels, this story is about a girl who in the period of a summer loses her innocence and realizes that life is one hell of a journey.
“So it did taste like something?”
“Well, yes, it did….”
“Like what? What did it taste like?”
She had her eyes closed as if she was trying to remember, and she was moving her lips around. Well, I guess it tasted like…chicken.”
Many times when I start reading a book that I’ve read before I’ll gradually remember the plot and how the story ends. That didn’t happen when I read this book. However this quote stuck in my memory… Isn’t it interesting how some of the strongest childhood memories are ones dealing with sex?
“If you didn’t let yourself like people, you’d shrivel up.”
Aunt Radene says that you just have to do your best to make the world a better place. I said I wasn’t so sure I could make the world a better place, and she said, “Oh, you already have, Mary Lou, you already have.”
How does a person ever know that for sure?
This was the first book I had ever read by Nicholas Sparks. I should have probably picked a different one, but at the time it was the only one in the library, not including the Notebook and A Walk to Remember, both of which I didn’t really want to read since I had already seen the movies. But it was a quick read and pretty enjoyable. I found a few sections that I could really relate to, which I included here.
Nights in Rodanthe, by Nicholas Sparks
As she turned to face him, however, she couldn’t help but stare.
It was his eyes, she thought, that did it. They were light blue, so light they seemed almost translucent, but there was an intensity in them that she’d never seen before in anyone else.
He knows me, she suddenly thought. Or could know me if I gave him a chance.
As quickly as those thoughts came, she dismissed them, thinking them ridiculous.
I think Sparks must have stolen these thoughts from my head. Wish I’d had the guts to act on them though.
Everything about him made her long for something she had never known: the way he made what he was doing look easy, the shape of his hips and legs in his jeans as he stood on the ladder above her, those eyes that always reflected what he was thinking and feeling. Standing in the pouring rain, she felt the pull of the person he was, and the person she realized she wanted to be.
She would cross a boundary she’d erected in her mind, and there was no coming back from something like that. Making love to Paul would mean that they would share a bond for the rest of their lives, and she wasn’t sure she was ready for that.
Young and old, male or female, pretty much everyone she knew wanted the same things: They wanted to feel peace in their hearts, they wanted a life without turmoil, they wanted to be happy. The difference, Adrienne thought, was that most young people seemed to think that those things lay somewhere in the future, while most older people believed that they lay in the past.
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