A review by askylark
The Book of Dahlia by Elisa Albert

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.