The Pharmacist's Mate
Amy Fusselman
"I chose to read this book because it was short, and it also looked like it had a very interesting structure to it; and I'm sort of drawn to books that have different structures these days.
The story is a memoir -- and I would actually call it a braided memoir, meaning that it actually follows two stories. The author is recounting her journey to try to become pregnant through a variety of fertility doctors and different modalities; and she's also doing this at the same time that her father has passed away, and so she's revisiting her father's life and her father's death. They incorporate an exploration of the actual process of her father's dying but also a retrospective look at these journals that he wrote when he was a pharmacist's mate on a US Merchant Marine ship when he was in his early 20's.
The way the book is written, it's in very short little snippets of writing, so each section is numbered, and no section goes more than a page or two. Most of them are much shorter than that. She just has a way of really capturing the essence of a scene in a few words; the language is beautiful, and the images that she creates are really striking.
I think this is a great book for people who love writing. It's a unique book, and so I would recommend it to anybody that's interested in looking at how creatively an author can tackle a subject. It'd also be an interesting book for people who have suffered through family tragedy. I would give this book four stars out of five."
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