What Matters

Science-fiction. Romance. Action. Heartbreak. Suspense. All subjects that make a great fiction book, and all subjects that Everything Matters! by Ron Currie Jr. encapsulates. For me, reading provides an idyllic escape from reality. Whether cheerful or depressing, reading forces us to feel a different emotion, and sometimes helps to pinpoint the emotion we were trying to avoid in the first place. Such subjects and genres as science-fiction, romance, action, heartbreak, and suspense can be warped in a myriad of ways to create magic on a page, but what makes Everything Matters! my favorite English book this year, is how exquisitely Currie manipulates these themes. Currie sends the reader on a whirlwind journey of emotions and suspenseful surprises. What made this book so good for me was how Currie could stir up such strong emotions from the reader. As Junior begins to lose touch with reality the Voice states, “you are undergoing dramatic changes in brain chemistry brought on by heavy, prolonged alcohol and drug consumption” (104). At this moment in the book, I felt so annoyed with Junior. In school, the Voice described him as incredibly intelligent, and here he is completely throwing his life away. This complete foil provoked a great sense of anger from me to the point that I wanted to step inside the book and try to shake Junior from the insanity. And after a stint of being thoroughly angered, Currie turns around and provokes another strong emotion. After Junior pulls his life back together in an attempt to save his father, the Voice instructs, “He wouldn’t want you to die to save his life” (190). At this point, I felt a sense of fondness towards Junior for trying to save his father, but I was also annoyed at the desperate and self-destructive manner at which he was doing it with. Once again, Currie completely changed the feelings that I had towards the main character and the story. Near the end of the book, when Amy gets killed, she thinks, “I wish I could tell you there’s nothing sad at all in death, but I can’t” (258). Upon reading these last few sentences in the section, I was so upset. How could Currie do this to Junior? Hasn’t he been through enough? I was so upset that I ran to my mom and told her the whole story because I wanted her to understand how completely devastating and disheartening the story was. An author that can send me on such an emotional rollercoaster and make me feel deep sympathy for the characters is definitely doing something right. Not only was the manipulation of emotions superb in the novel, but the plot itself was incredibly engaging and imaginative. More than once in the text I was even reminded of Ms. Serensky’s stories about her family vacations, when her nieces and nephews would undergo “simultaneous disappointment.” So many times in the text could I image everyone who read this book undergoing a terrible plague of simultaneous disappointment.  However, no matter how disappointing the text was at times, it reflects reality because nothing turns out the way we want it to or as expected. Overall, this book was my favorite because of its raw, valid plot, and its ability to evoke strong, powerful emotions.