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Slapped With Gratitude

I'm reading The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas. 

It's interesting, but definitely not heart-warming.   

There are books that help you escape into a fantastic world.  It's a nice distraction. Although I love my own life, it's nice to be a high priestess vampire for a few days or or a woman reunited with her many-lives soulmate.

The Slap is not that type of book. Instead it's the type of book that makes me very grateful to be me AND not a character in the book.  

The book has a lot of drinking, smoking, and other types of drug-taking. That's just not something that's part of my life.   I mean I definitely know people who drink. And I probably have people in my life who do other drugs.  They probably don't discuss it with me because I don't do drugs. Or maybe I wrongly assume lots of people are taking drugs. It's like when I was in high school and thought everyone except me was having sex.   

I'm not really loving this book, because there's no character I can truly relate to, or respect.  And there's no character I can aspire to. You know, I love Hermione because I can relate to her. Like Hermione, I am often consulting books.  I love to read.  I love to learn.  I can be a bit idealistic. At the same time, I look up to Hermione because she has a magic wand, and knows how to make Polyjuice Potion.

I don't mind books that show human weaknesses.  In fact, if a book doesn't show human weakness, it's crap.  But The Slap is the type of book where the weaknesses strongly outweigh the good stuff.   ALTHOUGH I haven't finished with the book. Aisha sounds like a character I MIGHT like. I haven't gotten to her chapter yet.