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Elizabeth Is Missing is Emma Healey’s first novel about an older woman suffering from dementia. The story is from Maud’s point of view and gives the audience an idea of what life might be like to have one’s mind slowly deteriorate due to dementia. To help illustrate the point even more, Maud spends most of her time obsessing about the disappearance of her friend, Elizabeth. She finds it extremely difficult to follow the clues when she can’t remember what the clues are or even what they mean when she finds them.

There is very little background information about this book and its author, Emma Healey. Emma Healey finished her master’s in England in 2011 and published her first novel, Elizabeth Is Missing, in 2014. I learned that due to the death and decline of her own grandmothers that Emma was inspired to write about dementia in fiction. When I mentioned this book to others, no one had heard of it, instead everyone referred to the book Still Alice, which was made into a movie last year and starred Julianne Moore. While I have not read the book or seen the movie, I have read that Still Alice is also the first person perspective of someone in a decline due to dementia, specifically Alzheimer’s Disease. Because I enjoyed Elizabeth Is Missing, I might see if I can get my hands on Still Alice as well.

I feel like this book especially appealed to me because my own grandmother suffered from Alzheimer’s, and so I already understood what it was like to be a family member of someone with dementia. What captivated me about this book is that it gave me some insight into what my grandmother might have been feeling. The confusion that becomes second nature to someone with dementia is heart breaking. To think that someone with my mental capacity today could get to the point where someone doesn’t remember what they were doing only five minutes before or even the faces of her own children is frightening. I would like to say that the novel gave me a greater compassion and apathy for people suffering from dementia. The novel also has caused me to ponder what I would do if I were Maud’s daughter, Helen. My first reaction is that Maud is a person who plain and simple needs to be in 24-hour care for her own safety. While at the beginning of the novel, Maud doesn’t seem so badly off, as the story progresses, her dementia progresses and it is apparent that she can no longer be trusted to take care of herself. Through interactions between Maud and her daughter, it is apparent that making the decision to have your mother live in a nursing care facility is neither plain nor simple.

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I lightly updated this 2012 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $2.99.

Takeaway: Fairytales are not just for children. Stardust is intentionally a fairytale written for adults and quite good.

Gaiman is one of my favorite fantasy authors. I have read almost all of his books. He is mostly an adult author (although I enjoyed his children’s books Coraline and Graveyard Book.) He is often quite funny, but he is not a slapstick author like Douglas Adams.  Many of his fantasy are on the dark side, but not oppressively so, more realistically dark.

Stardust is a story of Farie.  The story opens with a fair, once every 9 years the people of Farie (the magical world) and the people of the village of Wall (at the wall that separates Farie from the rest of the world) have a fair and buy and sell and meet one another.  Tristran’s father, meets a woman from Farie (there is one sex scene right at the beginning of the book) and Tristan is a product of that night.

When Tristran is grown (without knowing his parentage) he takes a challenge to go beyond the Wall into Farie to retrieve a fallen star so that he can win the heart of the girl he loves.  Of course it is not that simple, but the getting there is quite good.

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Summary: If you know you want to explore more about theology and the bible but are not sure where to start, this is a good place.

This is the third of Ed Cyzewski’s ‘books’ that I have read. One of the books was really just a short, but I appreciate where Cyzewski is coming from and overall we have much in common. We are both stay at home Dads with theological degrees, we have both moved around a bit theologically, although our starting places and current places are not quite the same, the movement as he describes it seems familiar.

So I picked Coffeehouse Theology up because it was a free ebook as part of Scribd (ebook/audiobook subscription service that I recommend) and I thought I would read another one of his books. There is much to commend here especially for the Christian that is really starting to explore theology or wants to start doing theological work on their own.

Cyzewski starts by exploring what theology is and why theology has to be enculturated (made relevant to the culture that we are in and speaking to).

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