Reviews

The Book of Dahlia by Elisa Albert

jessieadamczyk's review against another edition

4.0

I almost stopped reading, but I'm so glad I didn't. What an awesome book.

falconerreader's review against another edition

3.0

I liked the narrative voice a lot more than I liked Dahlia herself. Part of the point may be that the death of a loser pothead matters as much as any death, that Dahlia didn't deserve to die young of cancer (this is not a spoiler--there's never any doubt as to the outcome). Really, Dahlia didn't deserve to have such a crummy family. Dying young is just adding insult to injury.

amysbrittain's review against another edition

3.0

So, I haven't recently--ever?--wanted to read a book about a young woman with cancer, but I heard the author on NPR and thought it might be interesting fiction. I read it on two short plane rides, so I obviously found it compelling. The protagonist is sassy, cynical, and not doing anything with her life when she's diagnosed and has to face life and death. I liked.

maedo's review against another edition

4.0

If you are currently miserable or struck with the sense that you are wasting your life, this book will hit uncomfortably close to home. Beautifully written, especially the metaphysical life-and-death passages. Having just come off of Portnoy's Complaint, I can see the Philip Roth influence in Elisa Albert. But Albert's full of heart, in a not tacky or trite way.

Yeah, this one got to me.

jorayne35's review against another edition

5.0

Very well written, I've been waiting a long time to find a book that actually makes me feel something. Yes, the character is selfish and all you want is for her to get up and do something. But the thing is in real life everyone has flaws. We all want to be the "perfect" person who reacts to situtations in the "correct" way, but sometimes (most often) that doesn't happen.It reminded me little of Six Feet Under, everyone wants life to be tied up--that by the end of it you left things in a good place, but sometimes things happen abruptly. Dahlia is real and by the end of the book you feel sorry for her wasted time....mostly because you know you've wasted some time yourself.

greenspe's review against another edition

4.0

Dahlia is painfully relatable. I wonder if law school applications spiked in some circles after this was published. A "Stone Diaries" for the quarter-life crisis set, and one I know I'll want to re-read.

And a perfect selection of cultural references throughout, no small feat!

breezybreezer's review against another edition

5.0

Very spunky. Interesting contrast to the "let's hold hands and wish ourselves better" cancer rhetoric.

askylark's review against another edition

4.0

Dahlia Finger is dying. We know this from the very get go. But even before her first grand mal you get a sense that what she's doing in her little house in Venice isnt really living either. So this book makes the point, if you sit around and waste your life and hold on to pain instead of moving forward, if you never really do Anything (yes the capital A) is your life forfiet? We flip from Dahlia's illness in the present, to her past. Truthfully, her past sucked. She bitches a lot about it in the book, but she never actually bitches about it to the people who deserve a verbal smackdown. So there's the other theme. If you hold onto those words, those wounds do you get cancer? She wonders, I wonder too. Does her almost life make her dying any easier? She basically contributed nothing to the world, she knows it. Or is it sadder, because she never did anything with the time she was given.

Albert is a great, fluid writer who throws down conversational tone like nobody's business. You become Dahlia's confident, the person she should have trusted with all her issues from the beginning. You pity Dahlia, but she pisses you off and frustrates you just like she does everyone else around her. I guess I wondered, did she just need the right person to get through to her? Or was she doomed, or rather programmed to never let anyone in, except of course, the cancer.

This a beautiful, heartbreaking book without a hint of tenderness, quite an accomplishment for the very talented Albert.

thenotoriousmeg's review

4.0

Unpleasant yet poignant, I found the protagonist hateful and relatable. The style and format of the book works well for the content. I didn't really like this book but thought it was really interesting.

arnie's review

3.0

29 year old JAP Dahlia has been sitting around watching TV and smoking pot when she has a seizure. It turns out she has a brain tumor. This comic novel then goes back into time as we learn about Dahlia; her wealthy, ineffectual father; her erratic, Israeli mother; and her shitty brother who turns out to be a rabbi. A funny novel but a downer in a way. A fun read and that's about all.