Darswords

Good Kings Bad Kings by Susan Nussbaum
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow! Just Wow! This book was fantastic! Wait… And yet it was not.

Susan Nusabaum has presented us with a microcosm study in her fictional novel of the society of disabled youth in conventional nursing homes. Wow, again, that was a mouthful (keyboard full?)! Sadly, I don’t believe that the truth is far from this depiction.

The individual stories that create the novel outlines the hopeful actuation of each person dealing with their own demons, their own needs, their own striving for romance while being disabled in one way or another.

As many of you know, I read my books on Kindle with text-to-speech. This book has a character that is Puerto Rican but the author did a great job of capturing all accents and individual speaking quirks. These were so well done that my Kindle reader read them perfectly and even if I wasn’t looking at the printed e-pages I still knew who was talking.

The story starts and ends with a wheel-chair bound woman who lands a data-entry job with this nursing home. She is a strong woman who isn’t stuck in the nursing home, but sees what is going on. We see, through her eyes and the eyes of the other characters what it feels like to be collectively warehoused with others of differing disabilities.

This book is an eye-opener for all readers. Hopefully we all come out of the read with a better understanding for our all our fellow citizens. Whoever recommended this book to me, thank you! I now have it on my Amazon wishlist and hope someday to have the Audible version as well. This is well worth a few rereads. I see that there may be a movie of this book. I bet it will be equally wonderful! Kudos Ms. Nusabaum!

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