Customer Reviews

Lithium for Medea

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I was utterly disappointed in the quality of fiction an indie (very interesting and likeable too) publishing house like "Seven Stories Press" backs and publishes. Braverman's novel is a fake; a laughably overwritten composition: just like an dreamy adolescent's diary it's wildly in love with words(four to five adjectives before every single noun), and it teems with metaphors, pseudopoetic images and repetitions. This is supposed to be a memoir of family tensions, love gone sour, addiction and death; nevertheless, it reads like an overlong, overwritten and very clumsy poem on Los Angeles, full of cliches and borrowed phrases. I wonder what made Ricky Moody write the preface: public relations can be real tricky.

Maybe I expected it to be better, but I found parts of this book a chore to wade through.

I appreciate that in real life people do go over and over the same scenes in their head, but it felt like Braverman had simply cut and pasted paragraphs from one chapter to another.

I guess I'm not the kind of reader who enjoys rereading sections for their lyricism, so I felt like I was being forced to do so against my will.

Hard to complain because it is so much better than most of the stuff I have read lately. That being said, I'd recommend Mark of an Angel, Virgin Suicides, and Ice Storm prior to this.

Perhaps if you are a drug addict with a cancerous gambler for a Dad, you will find that this is a perfect snapshot of your life and a motivating force. But for someone on the outside looking in, it's simply a very well written book about these people that repeats itself just a couple times more than I would have liked.