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Bognanni produces joy and personal thanksgiving
Book Review
By Derryll White
Bognanni, Peter (2019). This Book Is Not Yet Rated.
Well, think about it! If life was a series of movies, and you were in each one, would you accept the roles? Robber, raper, principal, king; warrior, woman, almost anything. It is worth thinking about. Ethan Ashby started watching a movie a day, every day, when he was 14. He’s 17 now, managing the Green Street Cinema, and he has watched 1,095 movies. That is a lot of starring roles for a young man.
Yes Peter, life is a movie in which each of us has the starring role. How we take direction, how proficient we are at ad-libbing (I could never lie to my mom and get away with it), how we handle pressure is all part of our process. Like this novel, life is a journey – not a road movie but a l-o-n-g journey. Very rarely do any of us get to write the last scene. It all just fades to black, but until that moment each of us can eat Milk Duds, enjoy and remember that our life in not yet rated.
The novel asks the reader to think, reflect, and ponder. Throughout Peter Bognanni produces feelings of joy and personal thanksgiving.
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Excerpts from the novel:
MOVIES – “Well, part of the reason I watch movies is to escape, you know? I mean they make me think, but sometimes I just want to get away from reality and live in a different one.
RULES – “I just don’t like this rule that says love has to be one thing,” she said. “Like, why is that all we get? Either you love someone romantically, and you want to have sex witht hem and marry them and have all of their babies forever, or you get nothing?”
LOVE – “I don’t need details. You care about each other. I can tell. You might even love each other. I just want to tell you that you’re lucky. Anyone who has some kind of love in their life is lucky.”
Raina and I were quiet.
“That’s all. It doesn’t always last. Sometimes it lasts for years. But you can’t take it for granted, okay. That’s not fair to people like me.”
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
