Author: Wally LambSummary: I’ll Take You There centers on Felix, a film scholar who runs a Monday night movie club in what was once a vaudeville theater. One evening, while setting up a film in the projectionist booth, he’s confronted by the ghost of Lois Weber, a trailblazing motion picture director from Hollywood’s silent film era. Lois invites Felix to revisit—and in some cases relive—scenes from his past as they are projected onto the cinema’s big screen. In these magical movies, the medium of film becomes the lens for Felix to reflect on the women who profoundly impacted his life. There’s his daughter Aliza, a Gen Y writer for New York Magazine who is trying to align her post-modern feminist beliefs with her lofty career ambitions; his sister, Frances, with whom he once shared a complicated bond of kindness and cruelty; and Verna, a fiery would-be contender for the 1951 Miss Rheingold competition, a beauty contest sponsored by a Brooklyn-based beer manufacturer that became a marketing phenomenon for two decades. At first unnerved by these ethereal apparitions, Felix comes to look forward to his encounters with Lois, who is later joined by the spirits of other celluloid muses. Against the backdrop of a kaleidoscopic convergence of politics and pop culture, family secrets, and Hollywood iconography, Felix gains an enlightened understanding of the pressures and trials of the women closest to him, and of the feminine ideals and feminist realities that all women, of every era, must face.
Series: None
Publication Date: November 22, 2016
Publisher: Harper
Pages: 272
Obtained: publisher
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Rating: 4/5
Bottom Line: A great story about how the women in the narrator's life influenced him
Grab, Just get it at the library, or Remove from your TBR list? Library
Review: I'll Take You There is another great novel by Wally Lamb as he explore the relationships within family. Specifically for Felix, his relationships with all of the females in his family; from his mother to his daughter and how it's shaped his life and how he views the world. Felix Funicello is later in life with an adult daughter who continues to amaze him. He's not so amazed by his ex-wife and prefers to think that his daughter was heavily influenced by him. Felix isn't one of those people that spend a lot of time worrying about the past and how things could have been different. He's more of a here and now guy so when an apparition appears and offers him the ability to look at his life on film, he's hesitant but curious; after of course he wonders if he going a little crazy.
As he goes through pivotal times in his life throughout the film, he begins to understand his relationships with both his sisters and his mother. Perhaps the relationship with the biggest effect on his life is his sister Frances. They had the typical sibling rivalry but it is obvious that Frances' ribbing of him goes much deeper. It isn't until Frances has health issues that the family begins to understand the issues are much greater than they had ever thought. He spends time viewing his life at different periods and it's pretty amazing how your mind can alter your perception of events to protect you.
Felix is a wonderful character and even though he's male and my dad's age, I could relate to him. We all get a little nostalgic and it manifests itself in a variety of ways. He's the kind of guy who would listen to you and then make movie recommendations based on what you've told him. He also has a fantastic relationship with his daughter Aliza, who is a talented writer but frustrated in her current situation.
I liked how Mr. Lamb wove in the Miss Rheingold story and how it wasn't just filler but it played a significant role in the story line of Felix, his sister and eventually his daughter. Mr. Lamb reminds us that to be a feminist you don't need to be a female. That men can champion the women in their lives just as clearly as the men. He also highlights that maybe using a little honey with your views can sometimes catch more interest than having such a hard stance. That sometimes you can't force your views on someone but demonstrate them by living your life in the manner in which you speak. This is definitely one of his shorter novels but it packs a punch and will stay with you long after you close the back.
I'll Take You There then begs the question of the reader, would you want to relieve your past in film if offered the chance? Would you be afraid that your childhood wasn't exactly how you remembered it? What if highlighted how your relationships shaped you and how you viewed the world? Would that change your outlook? These are all questions that you will ask yourself as you read the novel.
If you are a fan or haven't read Mr. Lamb, I'll Take You There is a good place to start but really his best work is She's Come Undone.
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Summary: The Hour I First Believed, Lamb travels well beyond his earlier work and embodies in his fiction myth, psychology, family history stretching back many generations, and the questions of faith that lie at the heart of everyday life. The result is an extraordinary tour de force, at once a meditation on the human condition and an unflinching yet compassionate evocation of character. When forty-seven-year-old high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his younger wife, Maureen, a school nurse, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, Caelum returns home to Three Rivers, Connecticut, to be with his aunt who has just had a stroke. But Maureen finds herself in the school library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed, as two vengeful students go on a carefully premeditated, murderous rampage. Miraculously she survives, but at a cost: she is unable to recover from the trauma. Caelum and Maureen flee Colorado and return to an illusion of safety at the Quirk family farm in Three Rivers. But the effects of chaos are not so easily put right, and further tragedy ensues. While Maureen fights to regain her sanity, Caelum discovers a cache of old diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings in an upstairs bedroom of his family's house. The colorful and intriguing story they recount spans five generations of Quirk family ancestors, from the Civil War era to Caelum's own troubled childhood. Piece by piece, Caelum reconstructs the lives of the women and men whose legacy he bears. Unimaginable secrets emerge; long-buried fear, anger, guilt, and grief rise to the surface. As Caelum grapples with unexpected and confounding revelations from the past, he also struggles to fashion a future out of the ashes of tragedy. His personal quest for meaning and faith becomes a mythic journey that is at the same time quintessentially contemporary—and American. The Hour I First Believed is a profound and heart-rending work of fiction. Wally Lamb proves himself a virtuoso storyteller, assembling a variety of voices and an ensemble of characters rich enough to evoke all of humanity. ~amazon.com
is an engrossing novel with characters you might not like but you definitely won't forget. I bought this book because it appeared to be a fictionalized account of Columbine with a lot of fact thrown in. It ends up being partly about Columbine but not the focus. The focus of the book is how people deal with tragedy and how they survive it.