Book Review: The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb

The book that I have recently finished (another pick by my book club), is The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb. I have read Wally Lamb's other two books She's Come Undone and This Much I Know is True. And enjoyed both very much. In fact, I would definitely include This Much I Know is True as one of my favorite books.

Also, I read this book on my mom's Kindle. Basically, a Kindle is an electronic book which can instantly download thousands of books as well as store thousands at a time. It also has an "electronic paper" display, made to look just like real paper, no back lighting or glare! It truly is easy on the eyes to read, and font can be adjusted as well.



My mom saw this on Oprah, and just had to have it, and I had the honor of taking it for a test run! And for a bonus, this normally $25-30 book cost a mere nine dollars on the Kindle. Of course there is that first price tag of the Kindle itself, and I don't think I will be making that purchase anytime soon. :(

Anyways, here is my review for the book, since this was supposed to be a book review, not a product review!

Excerpt from Amazon.com Review:
When forty-seven-year-old high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his younger wife, Maureen, a school nurse, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, Caelum returns home to Three Rivers, Connecticut, to be with his aunt who has just had a stroke. But Maureen finds herself in the school library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed, as two vengeful students go on a carefully premeditated, murderous rampage. Miraculously she survives, but at a cost: she is unable to recover from the trauma.
Caelum and Maureen flee Colorado and return to an illusion of safety at the Quirk family farm in Three Rivers. But the effects of chaos are not so easily put right, and further tragedy ensues.

While Maureen fights to regain her sanity, Caelum discovers a cache of old diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings in an upstairs bedroom of his family's house. The colorful and intriguing story they recount spans five generations of Quirk family ancestors, from the Civil War era to Caelum's own troubled childhood. Piece by piece, Caelum reconstructs the lives of the women and men whose legacy he bears. Unimaginable secrets emerge; long-buried fear, anger, guilt, and grief rise to the surface.
As Caelum grapples with unexpected and confounding revelations from the past, he also struggles to fashion a future out of the ashes of tragedy. His personal quest for meaning and faith becomes a mythic journey that is at the same time quintessentially contemporary—and American.The Hour I First Believed is a profound and heart-rending work of fiction. Wally Lamb proves himself a virtuoso storyteller, assembling a variety of voices and an ensemble of characters rich enough to evoke all of humanity.

My Review:
Well, I’m not quite sure how to start a review on this book. As explained above, this book begins by centering on the attacks at Columbine High School. I admit that this part was hard to read, although very eye-opening. I was in 7th grade when Columbine happened, I believe, and it just seemed so very unreal to me. I only heard about things through other people, since I really didn’t read or watch the news. I didn’t realize at all the horrible reality of what had happened there.
This novel also addresses post traumatic stress disorder, addiction, the prison system, abuse, natural disasters, wars, chaos theory, and the current state of our country, just to name a few. Throw in a mummified baby (yes, really) and there doesn’t seem to be anything that Wally Lamb doesn’t throw into this book.
This book was very long, and at times a little tedious, but I stuck with it since I absolutely love Wally Lamb’s work. I think that this book could have used a better editor, and would have made a great book if just one or two major themes were represented.
I guess I kind of feel like there’s so much to be said, that if I started, I would bore you to tears, so I will just end this with my opinion on the novel.
My opinion is this: I did like this book, and I think that if I hadn’t had such high expectations from Lamb, then I would have enjoyed this much more. I was also under some pressure to finish this book quickly, as I was reading it on my mom’s Kindle (that she was constantly asking if I was done with yet), and it was a book that my book club chose that I didn’t even finish in time for the meeting. It was okay though, because half of us didn’t, and the others that did admitted to skipping over the old diary entries sections. I think that overall this was quite a depressing book, and while I did like that the ending was a little hopeful, I still didn’t walk away from the book with the same uplifted feeling that I felt after books such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and of course, The Alchemist.
Would I recommend this book? To someone who enjoys reading a lot and has time for a thick book like this, Yes. To someone who just wants some light reading? Absolutely not. Not only is this book long, it has very dark themes and moments, in my opinion. I in fact, had to set the book down a few times, because it is sometimes just so hard and even overwhelming to see on paper all of the horrible things that have happened in our country just in the past ten years, which is how long it roughly took Lamb to write this book I believe. He included basically everything, Columbine, 9/11, The war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina. It can be a lot to take in, but I feel that this was a good novel if you know what you're walking into, which I pretty much did after reading some reviews.

As always, if you pick this book up, or already have, please let me know what you think!

-K