The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Beautifully written. Emotionally evocative. I empathized with Grace Winters closely and enjoyed watching her become the person she was by the end of the story. How she learned to live.

Life. Death. Grief. Guilt. Love. Flaws. History. Dancing. Ibiza. Miracles. Alien life. The ocean. Murder mystery. Friendship. Corporate greed. Environmental protection and destruction. Protests. Hippies. Mathematics. Astrophysics. Scuba diving. Marine biology. Family. Psychic powers. Orange juice. And so much more in this novel.

I wasn’t all that invested in the beginning of the novel. It took time to grow on me, but the voice engaged me. I noted some passages that captured my attention in the first quarter of the novel, but I stopped doing that as I became more involved in the story.

Favorite quotes:
“‘I feel like I have a life inside me that needs to be lived and I am not living it.” P12

“There are two kinds of ghosts that torment you when a young person dies. The ghost of who they were, and the ghost of who they could have been.” P19

“When you had a childhood surrounded by saints it was easy to feel like a sinner. A teacher once told me if prayers aren’t reaching God, it was because they had been blocked by your own sin.” p71

There were many more quotable moments, but I was too busy reading by then.

La Prescencia threw me for a long time. It felt so weird, but by the end, I understood the necessity of something so extraordinary. We are so familiar with our day-to-day lives that we need something outside ourselves to show us truth. To show us the miracles all around us that we take for granted.

Live your life. Truly live. What does that mean? I think that’s different for everyone. I know I go around in a haze of doing one thing after another, one day after another, and it’s when I slow down and look around that I remember how wonderful and crazy it is to be alive.

“Where there is life, there is possibility.” P39




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