Warning: This is going to read like a bunch of dis-jointed thoughts. I posted this stream-of-consciousness without doing any editing on it. It’s written just post-reading of the book while so, so many emotions are swimming in my brain
Do you ever have one of those moments where you finish a book and you are not entirely sure of the emotions that you’re feeling? Because that is how I feel right now. I just finished reading “Nevada” by Imogen Binnie.
One one hand, I feel this complete and total deep connection with her central character Maria. She…is going through a lot of similar stuff to me. Reading everything I seriously just couldn’t help but be like “yeah, sister, me too!” Or well, at least I had in the past. It’s complicated. Because like, I’m totally not her at all but at the same time I feel like I am if that makes sense. Like I didn’t do any of the crazy high school shit…unless you count accidentally running over my brother’s foot as ‘crazy high school shit’…but I have/had a lot of the same issues and realities in relationships as she does. And hell, I never just jumped in a car and headed west (I should have lol!) Closest I have gotten to that was that moment I decided I was moving to the Twin Cities. (Though a part of me still thinks I should have tried for LA.) I do have one, odd, but interesting question, and maybe I’m reading WAY too much into the character, but I really, really wonder if she is an Aspie. It…just fits way too perfectly.
On the other hand I have this sense of well…I don’t entirely know what it is over the relationship that Maria develops seemingly at random with a Wal-Mart clerk. I guess maybe jealousy is the correct term. I wish I had someone stumble into my lap, so to speak, at 20. I think it would have been very interesting. I know where I stood at 20, and where I stand at 32. And it could have been much more, shall we say, interesting. Closest I have had to that were my friends I made on LiveJournal and MySpace in the later part of the last decade. (You know. The one between the 90′s and the 10′s. Le sigh. I can’t believe the 90′s were that long ago.) I’m still friends with a few of them, and I consider at least one of them family.
Ok and on a third hand, or well, I guess I’m branching out to feet here, I feel a profound sense of longing and disappointment. Without giving away any spoilers here, I… Just the way the book ended. I was expecting something more and then all of a sudden it was like “oh…this is the about the author page now. But…But…Moooooooooooooooooooooooooore please!!!”
Honestly, I love this book. It’s just…awesome. You should take the time to sit down and read it. And interestingly, I don’t know what it is lately, maybe it’s the fact I’m finding books I enjoy lately, but this was ANOTHER book I finished in a mere matter of hours, not days/weeks like some books I have read. Ok. Time for dinner.