Alex Jeffers

While travelling, when I should have been giving all my attention to my loved ones, I sat down for a bit and started reading That Door Is a Mischief by Alex Jeffers. I meant only to distract for an hour, to start something I could pick up before bed later, but instead I read the whole book, cover to cover, in a day, to the detriment of everything I should have been doing.

I don’t know if I can be objective about this book. Like all of Jeffers’ stories I was pulled in to a bubble universe that I never want to leave. The biggest tragedy is that I’m not reading this book anymore. It is not, like the fairyland in the story, a universe I can literally climb inside, through some magic door, and stay there forever. More’s the pity, I would happily live with Liam and his dads, Harry and their made family, in this beautiful bubble universe that Jeffers created.

The fairyness of this story is presented so matter-of-factly you think: yes of course there are fairies, no need to make a big deal about it. Not a delicate, sweet fantasy tale, the book is at times dark, dirty, and horrible, the way life is. The reality of fairy-Liam, particularly as a teenager is rough, uncomfortable, and awkward, yet I wouldn’t miss a minute of it.

TDIAM is a love story above all else. More than a romantic love story, it is a love-of-life story, love-of-family, made and chosen. The story’s presentation of family is spectacular, inclusive, the future we all hope for where sexuality is irrelevant to love, to family building, and everyone can make the choices they want.

How long will it take me to be ready to talk about the central love story in this book? I don’t know if I’ll ever be over it. I’m still tearing up with the enormity of it days later. It’s a gut-punch, but breathtakingly beautiful as well. It’ll just leave you entirely breathless, but it will feel like a that first glow of oxygen after you’ve had the wind knocked out of you–like the sun in your chest, huge, glowing, unfathomably sweet.

I have recently written my own book and the conclusion of that writing was emotionally devastating. Living in your own head, with your beloved characters, dreaming them, breathing them, but at some point you have to let them go, to be done. That end left me so lonely without them. Finishing reading TDIAM came close to that loneliness. Where will I be without these characters? There is a hole in my heart shaped like them. If I have any complaint about this book it is simply that it does not go on forever and that eventually I had to close it. I wondered if I would be able to handle the ending, the last chapter was intense and emotionally rough, but Jeffers came through, perfectly, so that now I can dream always that these boys are as happy as they made me.

I don’t know how to recommend this book. It is certainly supernatural fantasy, fairies, fairyland and all, but it felt so real. The characters come off the page, like people you know, fallible, damaged and exceptionally beautiful people, exposed and broken and still lovable just like your own friends. The sense of wonder Jeffers creates when people really see Liam, see the world around them differently, stuck with me. If you were going to read a fairy story anyway, read this one. If you only wanted a window into the lives of people so real you think you might pass them on the street, read this one. If you want to utterly lose yourself inside someone else’s massive world changing love, then read this book.… (plus d'informations)

This is a quite strange but oddily enthralling novel; at the beginning the reader has no clear perception of what he is reading or the whole story, it’s not like the author gives you a clear starting point from where you can follow him along a path; instead the author himself jump between present and past, sometime in his memories, sometime in reality, always recording all his actions, or memories, in a never-ending love letter he is writing to his at home lover Ethan.

Actually this is not really a novel, since the main character, Alex, is the author himself, not only same name but also same surname, so I can only thing that also the little details of his life, where he studied, where he lived, who is now loving, is indeed his real life. And so this letter he is writing, that will become a novella in form of a love letter, is a way for him to say something to his lover, Ethan? Or maybe it’s a way to plea forgiveness for something he has done and is trying to run away from? But then why if that is the case, he is coming back right in the place where all the problem seem to have begun so many years ago?

When Alex hadn’t met Ethan yet (and this is a nice touch as well in this love story, Alex and Ethan are first cousins and they were pen-pals way before they met) he was spending a summer near Tulum and Palenque in southern Mexico; he was helping a college professor with her summer course to a group of students and among them there are Peter and Keenan, apparently straight, apparently carefree boys who will have a great impact on the older Alex, something that maybe will push him towards the path leading him to Ethan. Is it for this reason that 10 years later Alex is back in Southern Mexico, meeting with Keenan and his new lover, but without Ethan?

It was not easy to understand if Alex was running away from Ethan to go back to a past lover, or if he was trying to fix a mistake he did in the past; only in the last pages we will understand what all is about but one thing I understood, the love Alex has for Ethan: despite everything he was writing a love letter and the most romantic moments, and in a way also the most clear and simple, where the memories Alex had of his time spent with Ethan. So I was sure at least of one thing, that at the end of the letter Alex would return to Ethan.

The writing style is not simple, but don’t worry, this is not one of that tedious novel in first point of view; it’s indeed very much like a letter, like the reader was the recipient of it and was reading it at home. Alex has a way to describe both feelings that things that is rich but flowing, and it’s easy to forget you are reading a first point of view novel, probably since you really identify in the narrator.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1590213483/?tag=elimyrevandra-20… (plus d'informations)