Read This Book At Your Own Risk!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                       Those who are serious about actually reading it, had better skip this post altogether.  Because, in order to reveal what upset me so about this novel, I have to reveal key plot points that may ruin things for potential readers, but explain why I put the book aside for two days.

                                         I chose "Why We Came Into The City," because I thought it fit into my Brat Pack rubric.  Which it does.  The characters are not as bratty as their Eighties counterparts; they are more feeling, and struggling.  Their New York is not so much a world of privilege, as trying to find one's own niche in it.

                                        All of the characters are young, barely into their thirties, if that, and have known each other since college.  One of them, Irene Richmond, who works at what sounds like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or is a stand in for it, is diagnosed with what eventually turns out to be bone cancer.  This is bad enough, but what Jansma does is take the reader through the treatment process--with its pain and side effects--so clinically detailed, the reader feels as if he or she might be going through it, too,  As one who watched my own mother go through this. (it was lung cancer, not bone) I found this upsetting, and anyone who has gone through this experience would, too.  TMI, Mr. Jansma.  I had to put the book aside.

                                       Added to which, the depiction of Irene's death is done in two ways, one of which I finally came around to the idea it had to be hallucinatory.  In this version, Irene, nearing the end, decides she does not want to die in a hospital--who can blame her???--so she watches the nurses' schedules, puts on a red coat and boots, and sneaks out into the dead of Winter, where she ends up dying alongside one of the statues in Central Park.

                                        This, I figured, had to be hallucinatory.  Because Sara, of the group, gets the hospital call that Irene is near the end, and they all go and watch her departure.  Again, much too upsetting.  But--at the time, I believed the Central Park scenario, so, if the woman they thought was Irene was not, a mystery would evolve for a search for her, and the nursing staff would have faced charges.  When the plot did not go in this direction, at all, I realized Irene was hallucinating.

                                        The novelist fails to make this clear, as one is reading it.  Throughout the rest of the novel Irene hangs over them all, like something out of Daphne Du Maurier's "Rebecca."  I am not saying the book is, in any way, Gothic, it is not, but Irene, though dead, never really leaves the book, even though she has left the world.

                                        I found the answer to my questions, once I finished the book, and read the Acknowledgements.  It always pays to read everything, darlings.  Jansma apparently based Irene on his sister, Jennifer, a big support in his life.  He says the book was written in memory of her.  So, I gather, she went through something of the same thing Irene did.  I was sad for the author, when I read this.  But it clears up everything.

                                       Actually, maybe you should read this post. If one goes into the book knowing why this aspect of the narrative is so upsetting, you may not be as upset as I was.

                                       I can recommend the book wholeheartedly. With the added comment that it is not for the emotionally squeamish!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!