Smoke gets in your eyes.
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She is unpredictable, frequent moodswings. Sometimes she’s nice, and sometimes she’s not.
Her name is Yan Ying. 90% of the world can’t pronounce it properly, simple as it seems. But no one really cares so they just call her YY. She is not fond of people with the same name as her. She turns 14 on 6th September and she loves her birthday cause it is a sex symbol. She was from Yew Tee Primary and is still proud of her school. She will never forget the class of 6D’07, or the batch of P6’07. She is currently an idiot in Nanyang Girls High and it is a love-hate relationship. She belongs to 202’09 which she, to be honest, doesn’t feel much for. She is a Theatre Club girl and is more than proud to be one. She especially loves Emo Batch♥, and looks forward to devoting her next 3 years to TCN with much optimism. She does ballet with more than just passion but she can’t do a center split. She is trying her best and is currently aiming for a far-fetched distinction for Grade6. She loves hiphop just as much though she’s pretty new at it. Her favourite sport is swimming and she occasionally plays basketball as a form of stress-relief. She likes to be tan and loves her swimming tan line. The piano, is yet another love-hate relationship. Like most teenagers, her hobbies include MSNing, blogging, and youtubing and facebooking. She loves shopping and doing random stuff like gaying people, jumping over railings, walking in the rain, and having completely irregular sleeping hours. Unlike most teenagers, she thinks that rap music is trash. She also thinks that she is getting old cause she hates the songs the average listens to these days. She can’t explain her love for oldies, country music, ballads, and sentimentals. Nostalgic songs are the best. Her favourite bands are Michael Learns to Rock, The Beatles and Westlife. She loves too many singers to name them all. “Forevers” are bullshit as of now. The night speaks to her the way no one else can. Her favourite thing to do is to curl up with a book on a rainy afternoon in her room, where she feels safest in. Her favourite flower is a black rose, but on the contrary, she likes rainbows and hugs too. She is always torn between two. But she is determined when she sets her mind on something, so she wants the world to shut up and believe in her. Just watch.Tag
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Wednesday, December 10, 2008, 11:59 PM
mercy.
"What would you do for someone you love? Would you lie? Would you kill?"
First published in 1996.
"Mercy" - Jodi Picoult. Mercy killing, a literal "loving somebody to death". The question is, would you kill someone you love if they asked you to; if they were sick, frail, suffering, dying; despite the consequences you'd have to go through? Do you love them enough to do so?
As always with her books, this one surrounds a crime. In this case the murder was done out of love, not hate not vengeance, which is unusual for trials like those.
"It's unsettling to hear about a man who loved his wife so much that he'd be capable of doing this. It makes us all feel a little guilty, because we probably wouldn't go to such an extreme. Admitting that Jamie had the courage to do such a thing also forces us to admit that we wouldn't. That we don't have the same kind of strength, or the same depth of emotion for our husbands and wives and lovers."
If you haven't guessed, the book revolves around a man by the name of Jamie Macdonald, who kills his wife who is dying of cancer because she asked him to.
He did it by suffocating her with a pillow - Euthanasia, a controversial issue - and then drove to his cousin (Cameron Macdonald)'s town where he is the police chief, voluntarily confessing his crime. Goes round with the court thing again, the lawyer (and Allie, Cam's wife, who was touched by what Jamie did) going about finding witnesses and stuff. Yes I love the whole courtroom drama and "criminal investigation".
I also like it how she always plays with time, like she would start each section with "At 8.05 in the morning..." and then tells us what each characters were doing at that time, on the day of trial. It's hard to explain but I like her time precision, "It was over at 7:38a.m.", "Graham sat down. It was 9:52." The time thing just seems important; she ends the section/paragraph with it.
Although this definitely isn't one of her best books, and I wouldn't recommend it although the idea is good. Same for the books I hate - the second half hooks you on, the first half is just a bore. A very good book (even if it's as thick as Nineteen Minutes) can take me a day or two to complete, this one took me a week or two - procrastination, lack of enthusiasm. Expected much more from such a talented writer, but maybe it's because Mercy is one of her early books so there's not much that we can expect.
Characterization was weak too, I did not feel any connection to them. And then there was some extra-marital affair which I had completely no interest in, which I found no link to the general base of the storyline. I didn't find myself interested in how the clan chief - who doesn't even seem to be a good role model for his people - betrayed his wife; I'd rather the author spend more time exploring the Jamie-Maggie case which was quite vague for me.
The ending was a disappointment because I did expect twists like those I read from her most recent books, it was simply that Jamie and his lawyer won the case in the end, not that Jamie even seemed to care much in the first place. The betrayed wife Allie also went on staying with her husband Cameron, after a while of the whole big drama thing.
And then there was also the unnecessary erotism, contrary to popular belief (ahem) I did not find them very enjoyable. -.-
However, I've never mentioned how much I love her quotes.
"You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride." - Jamie MacDonald
"Then she pictured Ian's face. With Allie watching, she lowered her hands to expose her left breast, which was now marked with a new and painful burn just over her heart.
Allie covered her hand with her mouth. Ellen reached for the calendula cream, which was supposed to ease such scars and inflammations, and gently rubbed it in a circle over the red welt. "Ah," she said, smiling for Allie's sake. "Much better." The redness faded a bit, and Ellen admitted that the cream helped a little with the smarting of the skin. But it did nothing at all for the deeper sting and ache, since any fool could tell you that neither candedula nor any other potion known to man could possibly soothe right through to the soul."
I'm sorry if the above held no interest to you whatsoever, I just like to do reviews of Jodi Picoult's books, yeah. (:
/edited
Some problems just seem so minor compared to others. Apparently life's never fair, people who put in effort don't always get what they want. It's an obvious sign this time.
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