Someone She Always Has Known

Title: Someone She Always Has Known

Author: Georgia Blue
Publisher: Create Space
Medium: Kindle

Amazon Synopsis:
Eleanor is a beautiful, brilliant feminist who rarely doubts herself but frequently doubts others. Callie is a passive free spirit who strives to make everyone happy. Jodie is shy, obsessive compulsive who longs to remain in her sheltered world. Together, the three childhood friends help one another navigate that exciting yet overwhelming time – college. Set in the early 1990s, during a time when VCRs, cassette tapes, and floppy drives seemed like technological marvels, the girls attend BYOB parties, engage in pranks, contend with weird roommates and demanding professors, fall in love, and suffer heartaches. By graduation, each friend has left behind the girl who started college and become someone she always has known.

The love of my life knows just a little bit about everything to be dangerous. He studies and reads and philosophizes about every subject under the sun. Lately he has been listening to authors and linguist interviews in the morning on You Tube. I’m in the other room getting ready for work and sometimes part of it sinks in (must be the hum of the blow dryer or the heat of the curling iron or the crap they put in make-up). This morning I was listening to him listen to an interview with Noam Chomsky, and thinking about my review for Someone She Always Has Known.

We started to discuss a book by a guy (David Foster Wallace) who gave this really awesome commencement address at Kenyon College Class of 2005 (something I listened to him listen to the other morning while getting ready for work), called Infinite Jest. It’s a long book – 1100 pages. I pulled my philosophy out of my ear and said something that I felt was witty about the title of the book being about in line with the length of the book and maybe the author planned it that way. Without Google, I cannot recall what the book was about, but then the love of my life reminded me that Infinite Jest is also part of a scene in Hamlet.

Ah, yes, high school is coming back to me slightly. I do recall reading Hamlet. I could not recall the infinite jest part – thank goodness for Google! I did what every good employee does, arrived at work and immediately found and read the scene.
I need to stop talking about listening to people listen and get to how this ties in with Someone She Always Has Known before you totally glaze over and click over to the People of Wal-Mart website. During our conversation this morning about Noam Chomsky and the commencement speech guy (it’s called This is Water in case you are interested), I started thinking about one of the characters in the book that I never really related to until just that moment. I don’t think she was supposed to be the main one you rooted for or were supposed to love as a reader. She’s in every college, she’s in every workplace, and you probably know about three people who totally make up this one character.

She’s the main one! She’s the Hamlet, the Infinite Jest, the Noam Chomsky, DFW, the read between the lines, if you will, character that this book totally revolves around and dammit, she’s the one I should have started pulling for at the beginning of Someone She Always Has Known, but she annoyed the crap out of me. Shame on me! She is the one I loved the most at the end, because her character arched more than the others. She could totally walk away from the pages in the book and stand on her own.

Someone She Always Has Known is a coming of age story revolving around three friends and their time at college. Its set in the early 1990’s a time when I was playing Navy Sailor and missed out on that part of college, but I had barracks, which is the same thing, only a little different. The early 90’s were pretty revolutionary in and of themselves even without all of the college stuff. Someone She Always Has Known discusses the ups and downs of being out on your own for the first time, while still having constraints and rules - a trial run, if you will, for being a real grown up. It delves into deep issues and problems that probably plague young folks heading off to college (or the military or a job or simply out on their own) every year. It’s about friendship and learning to find yourself – something that in many ways is equally as important as getting good grades – in order to succeed in college and subsequently, in life.

Someone She Always Has Known was well written, well edited and while it’s not Shakespeare it’s a great book for the young lady struggling through those first painful months at college or the middle aged woman who wants to go back in time to reminisce and wonder what she could have done different and did she arc in life.

And really, what’s not to love about an author name Georgia Blue!!