Everything You Ever Wanted: A Florence Welch Between Two Books Pick

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For his part, Luis Fonsi seems to think the implications could be profound. “It says a lot about where Latin music is nowadays and where our culture is. We’re breaking barriers down,” he told an interviewer in May, adding, “I think that’s the biggest win out of all of this.” The intrusive Nyx selection process has forced Iris to confront this, probing into her past, seeking out “the person most likely to convince her to stay”. Iris’s encounter with Edie Dalton, the “bold, boyish, sharp” love of her teenage years, is particularly affecting. “The way I felt about you was insane,” Iris tells her. “I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.” Having looked at an overview of MIDI last month, the System Exclusive section of the System messages seemed to be the major place left open for real future expansion, apart from the other undefined messages. The best part about System Exclusive is that the MIDI Specification designers cleverly defined just enough to make sure that the few simple rules would be used by everyone, whilst leaving enough leeway for all sorts of unanticipated future uses. There is rather more to this than just a way of ensuring that the MIDI standard does not go out of date - System Exclusive is more like a complete standard in its own right; hence the need for a series like this one! Everything You Ever Wanted is a real breath of fresh air for science fiction – a genre which has felt a little lost of late. Perhaps there’s something to be said though, in our current climate, for the current boom in the fantasy genre, one defined by its powers of escapism, versus the gloom of sci-fi, a genre that’s at its peak when it’s holding up a mirror to the current state of the world around it.

pg. 188 "You have to keep in mind that my kid didn't have parents for a while at a crucial time in his development and this has repercussions. We're working it out. We're healing. We're doing great, actually. And our version of doing great looks different from how it does for kids who have had a typical attachment cycle in the first three years of life. So he's going to need a little extra attention." It feels jumbled, and while the open-ended elasticity of the scenario ought to be a good thing, it seems accidental, not designed – a symptom of how much is left dangling in a novel that proves more tantalising than fulfilling. Sauma asks us to consider Iris’s choice. Is it cowardice, or suicide, or the chance of a lifetime? A severing of the ties that bind, or the one way to make them worthwhile? Tinged with melancholy and yearning, this novel is wry and frequently beautiful, and its culmination is surprising and deeply moving.Luiza Sauma's second novel focuses on Iris, in her late twenties, living in London, and alienated by her job producing digital content for brand campaigns that she doesn't understand. Having suffered from clinical depression for much of her life, or what she calls 'the smog', Iris is intrigued by the opportunity to apply to live on a distant planet, Nyx, which promises a return to the old days of traditional community living, with no social media. In its first two-thirds, Everything You Ever Wanted switches between Iris's old life in London, examining why she decided to go to Nyx, and her new life off-world, before focusing entirely on Nyx in its final chapters. The first is relatively straightforward but not to be neglected: simply put, it’s a good pop song, combining decades of songwriting experience, a weaponized chord progression, inspired performances by seasoned professionals, and access to an international music industry. The second factor helps to explain why “Despacito” was able to break out of the Latin pop realm and into the Anglophone and the global: Audiences had been primed to receive a pop-reggaeton song in the midst of an ongoing and unabated vogue for “tropical” sounds. While either of these two factors could have applied to previous historical moments in pop, the third is the one that most clearly locates “Despacito” in the early 21st century: in short, YouTube. Lauren was writing Some Girls at the time that the events of Everything You Ever Wanted were taking place, and while normally I'm not a huge fan of memoir-meta—that is, memoirists writing about writing their memoirs—it makes a lot of sense here because, well, it's part of the story. How do you become a parent when your uterus says no? How do you not, when it's the one thing you've been desperate to do? How do you reconcile a colourful past with a new, more 'traditional' role as 'mother'? How do you balance parent and writer? And, most pressingly, what do you do when there is clearly something wrong with your child, but doctors write it off? This story of a family adopting an Ethiopian child starts off slow, but builds to a wonderful ending, not quite "happily ever after", but more "merrily we go along" that brought me great joy.

Except that Iris sees her dead father everywhere. She finds herself in places and doesn’t know how she got there. She takes drugs she buys on the internet. She appears to be on the edge of a breakdown, or even madness. Much of this story is extraordinarily absorbing. I wasn’t particularly interested in Iris’s everyday London life, her drinking and depression - a state she calls ‘The Smog’. She seemed a very shallow, self-absorbed, not especially compelling personally. The minutiae of her job, her sex and family life, were of little interest to me. The story becomes much more engaging once she makes the decision to throw everything away and try for Nyx.She blogs at Today Moms on MSNBC, The Huffington Post and JillianLauren.com, which was named a top 100 mom blog of 2012 by Babble Magazine. I have a visceral loathing of overly-mysterious, ‘you decide’ endings that are not endings, merely full-stops. It was extraordinarily frustrating and disappointing, and the failure to bring the thing to a satisfying ending made the whole Nyxian project ultimately pointless. These chapters could have been amazing, but the world building here is not great and without a meaningful conclusion, it all seemed suddenly rather dull and boring. It felt like a hugely wasted opportunity. People begin to disappear - what is happening to them? I began to wonder if Nyx was real, or was it all in Iris’s head. Iris attempted suicide when she was sixteen, was her life on Nyx connected to this?