Thursday 9 June 2016

The History Major: A Novella by Michael Phillips Cash

This is a novella and an exploration into the mind's psyche.

Amanda wakes up with a hectic hangover. Where's her boyfriend Patrick when she needs him? The memories start flooding back of the fight they had because she wanted to spend their date time with her friends. Guess he won't be there to pick her up then. As she rejoins the land of the living with a splitting headache, she knows she needs to get to class. But who is this new person that claims to be her roommate? Why is she enrolled in History when she knows she never registered for the class? Who is Nick, why is he protecting her from the being trying to get into the classroom and for heaven's sake - why is the teacher dressed like Aristotle? Can someone please stop the chain of thought creating laws of association mantras that keep getting thrown at her?

The book was both hit and miss for me. I fully understand where the author was coming from and what he was trying to portray, but in trying to create the laws of association some serious stretches of relationships were made here. Being a novella, not a lot of time could be spent in fleshing out characters or creating links in Amanda's chain which left an incomplete feeling. I think that the author had a clear idea of how the titbits of info would tie together but as a reader I was confused with the jumping back and forth between situations and alluding to incidents about to happen that don't get explained. Amanda was a piece of work - I could quite happily have thrown something very heavy at her. Good editing was a relief during the read.


An interesting piece of work but not strong enough as a solid story for me.

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