A Fine and Private Place

A fine & Private place was a really good book. Although it is a fiction book about ghost, the story line was still very good. This book was written by a young author around my age which made the level of interest for kind of a younger age group. Once I picked up the book I didn’t want to put it down. The actual romanticism of being in love and being happy made me appeal to the book even more. Being happy in life and having a real sense of love, whether it is from a significant other or a family member seems to make a person life more complete. The book really emphasized that a lover makes life worth living for, or makes your life happier. To be able to share your life experiences with another individual is far better than to just experience anything alone. My thoughts about the book wasn’t just that the book was about a love story, but that it was a collaboration of a love story, a ghost story, and a story about life and death. Honestly I wouldn’t actually classify this story a ghost story, or what I would consider a ghost story, because it wasn’t a spooky ghost story. The ghosts in the story were Casper ghost, nice and friendly. The part of them being ghost actually helped emphasize on the idea of life and death. The book also had it funny part. Especially the raven, which could talk and was kind of the glue for parts the story. He relayed the information from outside the cemetery to the ghost and Mr. Rebeck. He also brought food for Mr. Rebeck, which Mr. Rebeck could not live without. The things that the raven said were just funny so he brought humor to it all.
The author choose to write this book about how each character lived one lifestyle and was uplifted one way or another and started on a different path. Mr. Rebeck chose to hide out in the cemetery because he was afraid to show is face in public. He felt like he was deprived of everything when they took his pharmacy away from him and replaced it with another pharmacy with a big title. Mr. Rebeck wasn’t intended any harm with his Pharmacy. All he wanted to do was help out people. After getting drunk and ending up in a cemetery where you don’t see many people, except ghost, he started feeling comfortable. He was able to fulfill his dream of helping people by helping Laura follow Michael to a different cemetery. He did this despite his own feelings about leaving the cemetery and not feeling comfortable. I was happy they were able to talk him into leaving the cemetery because he was able to start re-living his life again in the city. He found a mate to share his life with and he doesn’t have to hide anymore. The ghost didn’t have prefect lives either before they passed. Michael didn’t like his marriage and committed suicide to end the marriage. He had everyone believe that his wife killed him but actually he gave himself the poison. He figured if he could make it seem like his marriage was successful by beating the marriage race then it would look better. What he didn’t know was they would find out the truth. It didn’t really matter at that time because Laura had already fallen in love with him once they both realize they could be happy sharing their lives with each other. Laura was the lonely and always wished the she could have someone care about her. She wanted visitors, she wanted to hear people say they loved her, she just wanted to belong. Once she finally got that feeling it was so quickly taken from her. She knew she would not be happy unless she followed Michael so she could feel loved. Mrs. Klapper apparently wasn’t in a good marriage either. She was too busy trying to make her husband out to be who she wanted him to be, and didn’t love him for him. She gave him a really big mausoleum, but all he wanted was a small head stone. I believe Rebeck helped her realize that she can’t make people be who she wants them to be. He let her know that she can’t make him be her husband, which is all she kept referring him too. He also made her realize that she should not have been making fun the way he chooses to live. I think the author did a good job on pick the character and their flaws and fixing them at the end. The two ghosts fell in love because that was all that they felt they had left sense they are dead. Mrs. Klapper and Mr. Rebeck found each other’s flaws and helped moved their lives into another direction.
The supernatural nature of the book kind of took my thought process to another place. In the beginning of the book the ghost were afraid of death and they were sure if they were two fall asleep and forget everything if they would actually die. They were trying to stay alive, or away from death, for as long as they could. The part of them fighting for life made me think about people who are passing who may try to struggle for their life. One part of me would say just let your body rest in peace and don’t try to fight it, but there is also another part of me that says don’t give up. The ghosts in the book did a really good job expressing hope and holding on. They knew they were dead and they could feel or do anything, but they wanted to love each other because that was all that they could do to still feel human like.
All along reading this book I never really thought about the religion. Although this book is about life and death religion didn’t really come up much. Obviously a book about life and death can be read or talked about without talking about religion because I didn’t think about it. Maybe it is because it is supernatural. Looking at this book through a religious lens would probably change a persons outlook on the book. Different religions have different thoughts or opinions on life and death, or life in between life and death, so it would make the aspect of whole story change.
This book has so many different aspects in it that I believe anyone who reads this book would learn something for it or it would at least open your eyes to some things. One of the eye opening themes in the book was that life is too short and you need to live your life happy before the hour glass runs out. We don’t want to wait until we die to find our soul mate in our afterlife or in heaven. There are a lot of things that we take for granted especially people and we need to realize that we don’t have eternity to make the best out of our life here on earth.