What Happened To Evie Del Rio

 

361 pages

You can buy "What Happened To Evie Del Rio"...Here

You can follow Sarah Watts on "X" at @SKWattsWrites

• The Blurb...

Evie Del Rio was the one, as far as Ed Nash was concerned.
Growing up in the 80's, their teenage love was the inspiration for his song 'Used to Be' and helped Ed's indie band, The Mountaineers, to international fame.
But when Evie and her family suddenly up sticks and leave their London home without a forwarding address, she leaves a heartbroken Ed behind too.
Over thirty years later, washed up rocker Ed is suddenly back in the limelight when Evie's love song is used as the theme tune for a new TV drama. Once the song is later featured on TV documentary 'Musical Muses: The Girl in the Song' it's suddenly not just Ed who's asking...
What happened to Evie Del Rio?

• Our Review...

I have undertaken this review as part of the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge. See link

This week's prompt was a book from at least 4 differing view points.

Let me start this review by saying that the beauty of following a challenge like this is that it takes the reader out of their comfort genre. I was definitely out my lane reading this novel. I am an ex rugby playing 56 year old steelworker so really am not the target audience for a generational, middle class, family melodrama.

However, I did enjoy this well told tale. It could have been very confusing with numerous viewpoints and two of the main characters even changing their names. The author keeps control by dedicating each chapter to a different person and the name of that person is the chapter title. Simple but effective. 

Evie was a teenage wild child following a local band, and falling for the charismatic but dangerous lead singer. The lead singer is infatuated with her too and even writes a catchy tune about her. Suddenly one day Evie's family up sticks and move without any warning. Years later the song is a hit and the paparazzi fuelled by the lead singer are on a quest to find out all about what the teenage temptress is up to now. However Evie is now a respectable married woman with teenage kids of her and a dark secret...

A thoughtful piece about destiny, family and the shifting sands of love over 30 years. It's very hard to talk about the main theme of this book without giving a spoiler. The author unfolds the narrative at a perfect pace. Always leaving the reader wondering what the next mini crisis will bring to Evie's life.

• Selected Quotes...

I, on the other hand, can’t believe that Mum never told us about the song. I mean, how cool must it be that someone was so completely in love with you that they wrote a song about you? It’s like having your own “Wonderwall” moment.

I remember him telling me that all the songs he’d written about me would one day make him famous, and I suppose he was right. Although unfortunately they’ve also made me somewhat infamous,

We didn’t know about real life back then. Everything was about the next big thrill— where the next drink, smoke or shag was coming from. It was all- consuming, but it felt so real at the time.

Every step of dating someone and every situation you watch them experience shows what sort of person they are.

• If You Liked This Then You May Like...

The Memory by Judith Barrow. click here for review

The Dream Home by TM Logan

One Christmas Eve by Shari Low

• About The Author...

I've always enjoyed the written word and I have a great passion for music so I decided to put the two together and the result is my debut novel 'What Happened to Evie Del Rio?'

I like to think I'm enjoying my 'middle youth' rather than my 'middle age'. I'm married and Mum to two sons and a black rescue cat called Hector.

I enjoy going to gigs and discovering new music. I also love reading women's fiction but I do have a bit of a penchant for crime and psychological thrillers! If I'm not on social media, reading or listening to music then you will probably find me on a football pitch cheering on my youngest son and his team.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

 

⭐⭐⭐⭐

You can buy The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks...Here

You can find out more about Rebecca Skloot...Here

• The Blurb...

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. Born a poor black tobacco farmer, her cancer cells – taken without asking her – became a multimillion-dollar industry and one of the most important tools in medicine. Yet Henrietta’s family did not learn of her ‘immortality’ until more than twenty years after her death, with devastating consequences . . .

Rebecca Skloot’s moving account is the story of the life, and afterlife, of one woman who changed the medical world forever. Balancing the beauty and drama of scientific discovery with dark questions about who owns the stuff our bodies are made of, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is an extraordinary journey in search of the soul and story of a real woman, whose cells live on today in all four corners of the world.

• Our Review...

I read this book as part of the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge. This week's prompt was "women in STEM." STEM refers to Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. You can view my list for the year...Here

The weekly prompts are great for driving me out of my comfort reading zones. I don't normally read non-fiction for much the same reason as I do not watch the news. I know the world is an awful place and I don't want to be reminded of it. I prefer fiction. It's a destination I can escape to. Non-fiction aka Real-Life is the place I want to escape from. 

And so to this meticulously researched story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor, uneducated, inbred African-American. Some cells were taken from her while she was being treated for cancer. Henrietta died but her cells became the first to be reproduced in a lab in perpetuity. Hence she achieved a form of immortality. In addition the cells have been traded and researched the world over and thanks to Henrietta numerous cures for various life ending diseases have been found. Isn't that great you ask? Well yes and no.

If it was all altruistic, it would all be fine and dandy but it's not. Some companies are making millions from Henrietta's cells. Again this would be ok if Henrietta's family shared in the financial bonanza but they don't. The doctors in the US in the 1950s didn't have to ask for consent to take and use her cells. Reading this book will break your heart as you read about her family's struggles with poverty, lack of education, crime, addiction etc knowing full well if justice was served Henrietta's family would have been lifted out of cess pool of poverty. Henrietta would have approved of this. Someone is getting immensely rich to this day because of this and it isn't her family. Her family have been treated like a natural resource, Like a free oil well. So they don't get any money, and in the shambles that is American health-care they don't even get free health care. Thank God for the NHS, the UKs greatest achievement. 

The author does a wonderful job of tying the various strands of scientific research, corporate dirty dealings and the human story of Henrietta's family together. These are so diverse subject lines that this is no mean feat. In particular she tells the tale of Deborah, Henrietta's daughter and her fight for recognition of her mother's contribution to medical science. Deborah is uneducated but passionate. The part where she finds out about her sister and what happened her sister will absolutely ruin you. 

This book will leave you in awe of medical science, outraged at capitalist greed and heartbroken at the poor people at the bottom of society who pay the price. 

I have no plans to read any more non-fiction in the near future my soul couldn't bear the sadness.

• Selected Quotes...

Henrietta died in 1951 from a vicious case of cervical cancer, he told us. But before she died, a surgeon took samples of her tumor and put them in a petri dish. Scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.

if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors? Don’t make no sense. People got rich off my mother without us even knowin about them takin her cells, now we don’t get a dime. I used to get so mad about that to where it made me sick and I had to take pills. But I don’t got it in me no more to fight. I just want to know who my mother was.

Slowly, a multibillion-dollar industry selling human biological materials was born.

What we do know is that today, Invitrogen sells HeLa products that cost anywhere from $100 to nearly $10,000 per vial. A search of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database turns up more than seventeen thousand patents involving HeLa cells. And there’s no way to quantify the professional gain many scientists have achieved with the help of HeLa.

“but they made millions! It’s not fair! She’s the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?”

• About The Author...

Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning science writer whose articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine; O, The Oprah Magazine; Discover; and others. She has worked as a correspondent for NPR’s Radiolab and PBS’s NOVA scienceNOW, and is a contributing editor at Popular Science magazine and guest editor of The Best American Science Writing 2011. She is a former Vice President of the National Book Critics Circle and has taught creative nonfiction and science journalism at the University of Memphis, the University of Pittsburgh, and New York University. Her debut book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, took more than ten years to research and write, and became an instant New York Times bestseller. She has been featured on numerous television shows, including CBS Sunday Morning and The Colbert Report. Her book has received widespread critical acclaim, with reviews appearing in The New Yorker, Washington Post, Science, Entertainment Weekly, People, and many others. It won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, and was named The Best Book of 2010 by Amazon.com, and a Best Book of the Year by Entertainment Weekly; O, The Oprah Magazine; The New York Times; Washington Post; US News & World Report; and numerous others.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is being translated into more than twenty languages, and adapted into a young adult book, and an HBO film produced by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball. Skloot lives in Chicago but regularly abandons city life to write in the hills of West Virginia, where she tends to find stray animals and bring them home. She travels extensively to speak about her book. For more information, visit RebeccaSkloot.com, where you will find book special features, including photos and videos, as well as her book tour schedule, and links to follow her and The Immortal Life on Twitter and Facebook.

The Island Of Apples by Glyn Jones

 

You can buy Island of Apples...Here

316 pages

• The Blurb...

The Island of Apples is a brilliant study of a pre-adolescent boy's romantic imagination and dangerous enthralment, set vividly in the south Wales of Methyr Tydfil and Carmarthen in the early twentieth century

• Our Review...

I read The Island of Apples as part of the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge. see link.

The prompt for this week's book was magical realism. This is not a favourite genre of mine. I DNF'd 100 Years Of Solitude which is often held aloft as the pinnacle of the genre. To counter my feelings about the genre I chose a book set close to home, in the hope that this would encourage me to finish. Hooray I made it!

IOA is a coming of age tale, set in Merthyr (Ystrad) in the early 20th Century where a young boy Dewi is on the cusp of leaving childhood behind and entering the world of adults. Into his life comes a young boy of the same age with masses of confidence and experience. He is an adventurer with tales of derring-do among the crowned heads of Europe. He becomes the nemesis of the overbearing headmaster and Dewi hero worships him. But is he real or a figment of Dewi's imagination? All could be as it says on the tin, or Dewi having a breakdown or real magic. The ending is a Henry Ford. By that I mean it's like Ford's famous quote "If you think you can or if you think you cant, you're probably right. 

Thrillers with a twisty plot should, I feel, be read in a distinct pace. Breathless and accelerating to the climax. However this sort of writing allows the reader to meander and occasionally wallow in the succulent language.

I enjoyed the language and writing style but the narrative was just OK if you know what I mean. The ingredients were great but the meal was a little less than the sum of it's parts. Nonetheless a fascinating insight into the era. The author was a friend of Dylan Thomas and you can feel the influence of Under Milk Wood.

• Selected Quotes...

Her veins showed through her white skin, they were blue, but faint, like words scrawled on the other side of writing paper.

There was a lovely smell of frying coming from out there, and the bacon was making a nice sizzling noise like bike tyres on a sopping road.

And as soon as our train moved off up the valley towards Pencwm I saw the slope of the first raindrop falling like a fencing-scar across the glass of our window.

a mouth so wide you expected it to join up at the back of his neck when he grinned: and deep winy skin the colour of a purple apple, pitted all over with holes as though he slept every night on knitting.

We saw the lights on in the bedrooms where people were ill and dying; we stood at the door of the dark and cosy bakehouse and watched Mr Protheroe the night baker kneading the bread by the dim light of the bat’s-wing burner, up to his elbows in dough; we looked in over the frosted glass at the back of the post office and saw the yawning men getting the letters ready for the next morning. We stood silent and motionless under the hoarse or blub-blubbing street lamps, and saw the colliers going to the pits in groups with white faces, or coming home pitch-black; we saw the policemen, the bad women, the News and Banner printers, Herbert the milk meeting the morning train. Ystrad was alive every night with silent people, while above our heads, under the moonlight and the moon-sheeted blue on the slates, thousands slept and knew nothing of it, nothing of the darkness and the silence and the solitary lights on in town, and the soft whir and pounding of machinery behind closed doors, and the night creatures wandering the streets, the rats, the stray cats and dogs, the sheep and the little mountain ponies.

• If You Liked This Then You May Like...

Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas

Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee

100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

• About The Author...

Glyn Jones was a Welsh poet, novelist and literary historian. He served as Chairman and President of the Welsh Academy's English language section. A friend and contemporary of Dylan Thomas. click link for very interesting Wikipedia atricle on his life and career.