Book Title: The Book of Tomorrow
Author: Cecelia Ahern
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Available Format: Audiobook, Electronic Book, Paperback
Source: Purchased
Category: Fiction
Year: 2010
Page Count: 320
ISBN: 9780061968310
Find it at: The Official Website of Cecelia Ahern
Price: New package starts from GBP5.34
My rating: 4.0 out of 5.0
Goodreads' Blurb:
This is a story about how tomorrow can change what happens today...
Tamara Goodwin has everything she ever wanted and she never has to think about tomorrow. But suddenly her world is turned upside down and she has to leave her glamorous city life for a new one in the country. However, Tamara is soon lonely and longing to return home.
Then a travelling library arrives in the village, bringing with it a mysterious leather-bound book locked with a gold clasp and padlock. What Tamara discovers within its pages takes her breath away and everything starts to change in the most unexpected of ways...
I can't deny that I picked this book from the local bookstore's shelf mostly for the pretty cover :P And mostly because it's produced by the same author as P.S. I Love You, even though I only watched the movie and was not too in love with it.
This book consists of twenty six chapters which mainly focuses and is written from a sixteen-year-old Tamara Goodwin's point of view, with some chapter at the end by Rosaleen's. It's opened with Tamara contemplating on her father's recent suicide and how it affects her life and her mother's. The condition forces her to leave her comfortable life as a rich girl and moves out to the countryside, Meath, with her mother.
In Meath, they are sheltered in gatehouse owned by Tamara's uncle, Arthur, and his wife, Rosaleen. Tamara has to brace herself, enjoying what has life given to her. Her mother falling into a great shock from her father's death, is not going to be any help for the situation. Apart from the hardship, there she also meets numbers of interesting people like Marcus, Weseley and a nun, Sister Ignatius and discovers a secret written inside a book which she gets from a travelling library: her future.
With a sudden mental upheaval due to her father's untimely death, her mother's catatonic state, Tamara starts her adventures in the little town and soon finds out what it has hidden within for years.
This book consists of twenty six chapters which mainly focuses and is written from a sixteen-year-old Tamara Goodwin's point of view, with some chapter at the end by Rosaleen's. It's opened with Tamara contemplating on her father's recent suicide and how it affects her life and her mother's. The condition forces her to leave her comfortable life as a rich girl and moves out to the countryside, Meath, with her mother.
In Meath, they are sheltered in gatehouse owned by Tamara's uncle, Arthur, and his wife, Rosaleen. Tamara has to brace herself, enjoying what has life given to her. Her mother falling into a great shock from her father's death, is not going to be any help for the situation. Apart from the hardship, there she also meets numbers of interesting people like Marcus, Weseley and a nun, Sister Ignatius and discovers a secret written inside a book which she gets from a travelling library: her future.
With a sudden mental upheaval due to her father's untimely death, her mother's catatonic state, Tamara starts her adventures in the little town and soon finds out what it has hidden within for years.
I really like what the author has to offer from this book. The idea of the story is really simple, but Ms. Ahern gloriously builds the plots so that the secret within the book remains undiscovered until the last chapters. The author well describes the mental struggle of a sixteen-year-old girl's from losing a father and how she traps herself from some teenaged mischievousness.
In a few opportunities, the author also applies some wise analogies that the main character uses to contemplate her life. What I really like the most is the one with the 'bluebottles' analogy. I think it perfectly describes what Tamara and her mother have to suffer.
If you are wondering what the book's title really means, then you will find it more suitable starts from the middle section of the story. Though the idea of knowing that your future is already written in a book, might be really interesting, I think the author does not really put that magic inside. The power of the mysterious book just seems a little off.
Readers might want to be more alert on some swearing words in the book. And there are some misspells which I found really annoying as I read it. Eventually rating 4.0 is enough to show that I enjoyed this book.
Below are some of my favorite quotes from the books:
“I make it easier for people to leave by making them hate me a little.”
“All families have their secrets, most people would never know them, but they know there are spaces, gaps where the answers should be, where someone should have sat, where someone used to be. A name that is never uttered, or uttered just once and never again. We all have our secrets.”
“Hope like that, as I thought before, doesn't make you a weak person. It’s hopelessness that makes you weak. Hope makes you stronger, because it brings with it a sense of reason. Not a reason for how or why they were taken from you, but a reason for you to live. Because it’s a maybe. A ‘maybe someday things won’t always be this shit.’ And that ‘maybe’ immediately makes the shittiness better.”
“I wonder if my watching him from the armchair is what it's like to be God, if there is a God. He sits back and sees the big picture, just as I could see that if the bluebottle just moved up a few inches, he'd be free. He wasn't really trapped at all, he was just looking in the wrong place. I wondered if God could see a way out for me and Mum. If I can see the open window for the bluebottle, maybe God can see the tomorrows for me and Mum. That idea brings me comfort. Well, it did, until I left the room and returned a few hours later to see a dead bluebottle on the windowsill. Then to show you where my mind is right now, I started crying...Then I got mad at God because in my head the death of that bluebottle meant Mum and I might never find our way out of this mess. What good is it being so far back you can see everything and yet not do anything to help?
Then I realized this: I had tried to help the bluebottle, but it wouldn't let me. And then I felt sorry for God because i understood how it must be frustrating for him. He offers people a helping hand, but it often gets pushed away. People always want to help themselves first.”
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