Customer Reviews

Manual for Normal

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In "Manual for Normal", Rebecca has expertly brought a group of flawed charactors to her pages. Her creative skills are unmatched by dimension. There are assortments of conflict and many twists and turns. Don't look for the nebulous. It is a good read.

First time author Rebecca McEldowney has produced a very credible book that is definitely worth reading. Manual for Normal is a coming of age book, though unlike one that might have been written just a few decades ago. The cynical Holden Caufield, for example, saw the world being destroyed by those questing for power and money. Lubba James, MacEldowney's young teenage protagonist, is more puzzled than cynical, and she has some problems separating truth from reality. What both Holden and Lubba have in coming is that they see themselves as misfits. The truths Lubba learns in the course of her adventures are not always pretty ones. Mothers die, father are weak, a sister is cruel, the law ambiguous, and its agents, the two police officers who play an important role in her life, are deeply flawed, and even more unhappy than Lubba. But Lubba is not an updated version of Holden Caulfield. Holden had psychological problems. Lubba is thought to be deeply deranged, perhaps requiring hospitalization. Like Holden, Lubba is hard put to explain why so many bad things are happening in the world and, more specifically to her. Lubba copes by reading fairytales (the author leaves no doubt of her intent - she even mentions that Bullfinch is one of Lubba's favorite books). McEldowney uses the power of myth to help Lubba come to terms with, and even understand, what she is experiencing, though sometimes it is hard to tell whether or not Lubba is living out her life in a fantasy world, or just using the fantasies to help get through the day. Very little happens in a way that Lubba might have hopped, but that doesn't mean there is no happy ending. After all, fairy tales are not just stories about evil monsters eating children. Some fairy tales have happy endings, and some have morals. The very sympathetic protagonist of this story has both.

Lubba is reminiscent of J.D. Salinger's Zooey Glass, a teenage prodigy whose intelligence makes growing up particularly difficult. Lubba has extraordinary insights into human nature but lacks the maturity and confidence required to have faith in her own observations. She takes refuge in magical tales and overcomes tragedy with her natural instinct for sacred places. This is a story of innocence, alienation, disillusionment, and triumph, a private view into the mind of a sensitive yet perceptive teenager trying to achieve the fictional existence of `normal' while immersed in harsh reality.

I have been an absolutely voracious reader for over 40 years. I have, honestly, read thousands of books in all different genres. I guess it was just natural for me to end up as the Senior Editor for Windstorm Creative, Rebecca McEldowney's publisher. Although you might think that my job disqualifies me as a reviewer, I beg to differ. After all, my "review" got this book here in the first place. I feel as passionately about this book as I did when I first read it.

Let me tell you why this is one of my 10 ten favorite novels. The first reason is that the writing is clean and crisp. There's not a single wasted word in this book. Rebecca has an innate ability to pace her story so that as you delve further and further into the life of Lubba James, the pace quickens. Rebecca creates empathetic, three dimensional characters, and not just in the protagonist and her friends, either. One of the ways in which an outstanding writer elevates herself from the rest of the pack is in her ability to show you the "whys" and "hows" of the unsympathetic characters. You might not want to know what makes them tick, but it's imperative that you do.

There are a lot of so-called psychological novels out there which claim to mine the human psyche and illuminate the individual, but I haven't read many which actually live up to their hype. Manual for Normal does. Rebecca isn't afraid to show us how people get broken, how they go on and how they don't.

Lubba James is naive, angry, purposeful, lost and ultimately--and most importantly--true to her own self. What she discovers about the world certainly isn't what she expected, and it is a completely different world from the fairy tales she and her mother shared.

Finally, Rebecca is smart. And smart people write interesting books. Look for the mythic underpinnings in Lubba's tale and when you finally grasp all of this novel's layers, you will understand why I think this book is simply magnificent.

I have read it again and again; a well-thumbed copy is in my office, in fact. It holds up to multiple readings, and I always find something new.

Don't miss it.

Trying to figure what one's normal response might be to daily events is the challenge we all face. We want to fit in, respond appropriately, act sensibly... however those hopes might be envisioned. It is particularly difficult in the life of a young person who loses a loved parent at the very dawn of emerging adulthood. Such is the setting for Rebecca McEldowney's central character Lubba James, whose gentle and charming young life, filled with fairy tale and fantasy given in the arms of her loving mother, is violently disrupted by her mother's death. Lubba fits in poorly with responses that rattle the supposedly `normal expectations' of her distressed father and cynical older sister. My first reaction was interest as I was drawn into Lubba's inner struggle, and at time profound determination not to behave in `expected ways'. The interest turned to real concern, due to the author's ability to weave the reader into the journey Lubba takes, making her journey one the reader can enter with empathy and anticipation. It became something of a page-turner for me, and I think anyone who joins Lubba on her journey to adulthood will find her or his own life and journey enriched.