Wally Lamb

I Know This Much Is True (Oprah's Book Club)

This book took awhile to get into and when I did… it was tough. This book tackles a lot of hard subjects and made me uncomfortable (in a good constructive way.) 

I’m glad I read it, but I wouldn’t read it again. 

Jennifer Palmer

This book took awhile to get into and when I did… it was tough. This book tackles a lot of hard subjects and made me uncomfortable (in a good constructive way.) 

I’m glad I read it, but I wouldn’t read it again. 

emelia grace ilgner

Oh my god I don't think I've ever cried this much over a book in my LIFE

Amelia C 

Kristen Claiborn

There were a few reasons I decided to go ahead and read this book. First, I scrolled by it on my Facebook page because somebody in one of my book groups read it and loved it. I did an internet double-take because Mark Ruffalo was on the cover. Which brings me to the second reason: I love Mark Ruffalo. After a wee bit of digging, I discovered that HBO did a limited-series based on this book, which then brings me to reason number three: I really don’t like watching anything based on books before I have read said book. So, I hopped on over to the library website and checked out the e-book version. It took me a while to get to it, which became problematic when I finally picked it up and discovered this bad boy is 898 pages of words. Oh boy. 
	I’m going to start with the huge amount of words. I’ve used that to describe some of the big ones, and I stand by the description. 898 pages is a lot of words, and I feel strongly that this book would have been as good (and far more appealing to the average reader) if it had contained 25%-30% fewer words. Wally Lamb exhibits the literary equivalent of enjoying the sound of his own voice. There aren’t really awards for the most words (are there? Did I miss that memo?), and this book really wanted to be a bit more concise. Just a bit. 
	I’ve heard many books referred to as “sweeping,” and that descriptor is valid for this one. It doesn’t sweep across land or time (ish), but it sure does run the gamut of human emotion, family crap, self-discovery, and healing. There were parts of this book where I could feel the book. I felt the pain Dominick went through when Thomas chopped his hand off, and when Thomas was committed to Hatch. I felt the anguish Dominick went through when he woke up after his fall and realized he missed Thomas’s hearing. I wept along with him when he described how he felt after the death of his daughter, and I was seething with anger while reading through his grandfather’s papers. Lamb conveyed those emotions on the page more effectively than most authors I have ever read; it was truly impressive. 
	This book was published long before the emergence of trigger warnings, but I feel like this one should include them. There is a LOT of death. Lots of mental illness. There is spousal abuse, child abuse, misogyny that made me sick to my stomach, and more. Use caution when reading this one, but definitely read this one.

Lyric Hooey

Wow, this is a powerhouse of a book. It took me maybe 100 or so pages to get fully into it, and then you got another 800 to go! This book was so detailed and Dominick's thoughts were so clear it felt like you were reading nonfiction at times. It was sad without being so sad that I couldn't read it before bed, lol. But despite all the mental illness and heartbreak in the book there's a pretty understood and full picture ending that makes it all worth it. Basically every character in this book has crap, just like in real life, and so nobody is perfect but Wally Lamb helps you get that.

Natasha Musa

This book is amazing. It took a while to finish it cause it was a real chunkster but it was well worth the read from beginning to the end. Wally Lamb's writing is epic and brings to life the main protagonist's character that you can't help but feel his pain, his burden, his disappointments and frustrations. Definitely a must read.

Jaymie Lemke

Yulande Lindsay

I first tried to read this book in 1999 and simply didn't 'get it' and gave up less than half way through. I decided to give it a try this year as part of a project to read those books that have sat on my shelves without being read and decide whether or not to give them away. I will not be giving this one away and will probably try to read the rest of his work.

There is a debate in this country (Jamaica) about whether or not to close Bellevue Hospital, our only government supported hospital for mental illness. A lot of debate deals with the support from and impact on families with members who suffer from a variety of mental illnesses, among them paranoid schizophrenia. This book I feel takes a look at a difficult impossible to resolve issue, the impact of a paranoid schizophrenic on his family. In this case, the twin. Dominic Birdsey is a damaged man, as damaged as his diagnosed twin. The problem is, his illness is not as easy to diagnose but is assuredly just as destructive. It is an exploration of his relationship with his schizophrenic brother, but also looks at his relationship with his mother, his wife, his stepfather, etc. It explores the genesis of his anger and his desire to discover his real father.

It is riveting, 912 pages and I finished it within a week. It was worth reading again and would recommend it to anyone.

Robin M Cabana

One of the things I loved most about this book is that I was living in Norwich, Conn., when I read it - the place where Wally Lamb is from and where he set this novel, even though he calls it Three Rivers. It just made it so much more interesting. I loved the crazy characters and their connections. It's a monster of a book but I couldn't put it done.

Brishti Basu

Martha F.

Moxie Minion

Gwyn Dill

Laura Mauler

Dr Seth Jones

Melissa M.

Melissa Bragg 

With his stunning debut novel, She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with I Know This Much Is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal--this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world. When you're the same brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your bands--the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper--if you've promised your dying mother--then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the influence of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin--the guy who beat the biochemical rap. Dominick Birdsey's entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man (the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room and built submarines at night), and their long-suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self-conscious: She holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth--her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she'd had no control. Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, his mother's watchful "monkey"; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother's gentle "bunny." From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness--and ultimately self-protection--in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery. I was still afraid of his anger but saw how he punished weakness--pounced on it. Out of self-preservation I hid my fear, Dominick confesses. As for Thomas, he just never knew how to play defense. He just didn't get it. But Dominick's talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible-spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick's lives. To save himself, Dominick must confront not only the pain of his past but the dark secrets he has locked deep within himself, and the sins of his ancestors--a quest that will lead him beyond the confines of his blue-collar New England town to the volcanic foothills of Sicily 's Mount Etna, where his ambitious and vengefully proud grandfather and a namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather's handwritten memoir, The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings. Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico's fablelike tale--in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep--becomes the old man's confession--an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truth's of Domenico's life, Dominick learns that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestors' transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin. Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth-century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity's deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, I Know This Much Is True is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.

I Know This Much Is True (Oprah's Book Club)

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