Rating: 
Summary: An amazing literature that has captured all my love....
Review: Gloria Burgess lost her husband to leukemia and had to learn to accept the fact that her life had taken on a drastic turn since her most tresured love was dead. In the process, she had to cope with the turmoils in her emotions and face with the ironies of her feelings ever since grief engulfed her. A most fascinating and beautiful literature. It fully rejuvenates my love for my partner and made me understand the importance of treasuring one when he's alive. Much tears had been wept over Necessary Madness, and I strongly recommend this book. Integrity in its emotions is what this book has to offer...
Rating:
Summary: "He coaxed the words..."
Review: I admit it: I'm floored. Seventeen years old? But yes, the author of this very well-written novel was all of a ripe and vintage seventeen years of age when she wrote it. Nearly impossible to believe. I would give this novel highest marks even had this not been so, but that it is so - well, I'm floored.I read Crowell's second novel, "Letting the Body Lead," before I read this one. It was good, and one would expect an author's second novel to be better than their first... but this is not the case. While her second novel is strong and her command of literary language impressive, it is the first novel, this one, that really astounds. Age of author aside, this is real talent. The story line begins with a young widow and mother who has just buried her much-loved husband, succumbed to leukemia. Crowell's language draws the reader into the bleeding soul of the young widow, makes the pain achingly real. The inner struggles to heal are more than convincing. Even the descriptions of the deceased husband's artwork, "painting for his life" as the character puts it, bring the paintings to life in the mind's eye of the reader. The child, a young boy, is forced to mature over early, as he is told he is now "man of the house." For a while, he is the stronger of the mother and child grieving their loss, but isn't it often so? The two exchange roles of who is the healer, who is the one most in need of healing, and so both begin their faltering steps to recovery from their grief. Loss of a loved one brings out the man in the boy and the child in the woman, but, gradually, they resume their stations in life of mother and son and are stronger one for the other. Dealing with death, for all three members of the family, is a necessary madness and Crowell expresses it just that way. "He coaxed the words onto my silent tongue," the widow says of her husband. The least convincing thread weaving through this novel is the relationship between the young widow and her estranged mother. Something's missing. The young woman's anger at her mother is palpable, but the degree of it remains a puzzle. Mom tends to yell and be abrasive and unkind, but so many family dynamics are messy and imperfect, that the grown daughter's fierce hatred of her mother doesn't quite ring true. Her relationship with her father, however, described as something of an "emotional incest," the father worshiping his daughter as a replica of his own lost and youthful love, however strange, is more convincing. Minor flaws. Upon turning the final page, the overall sense of the book remains that this is not only the vivid description of the death of a young artist and the heartache of those who love him, but that it is in itself - a work of art. At any age.
Rating:
Summary: Ageless
Review: I had been wanting to read this book for some time, because the author attended my undergraduate school, Goucher College, in Baltimore. After reading all the great reviews I was expecting something quite good. I found it to be a trite book, with almost childish dialogue-- the kind of exchanges that a typical eighteen year old (the approximate age of the author upon writing the book) might imagine would go on between adults. Character development was minimal, but the dialogue was so shallow that it distracted me from anything else the book may have had to offer. I only finished the book because it was short enough that finishing it wouldn't be too great a waste of time. It didn't even have the satisfaction of a trashy novel. If I hadn't been expecting something good or different, maybe I wouldn't have been so disappointed. I think it's great Ms. Crowell managed to write a novel, but I can't help but believe that had the book been written by a thirty year old it wouldn't have received a second look as serious reading.
Rating:
Summary: Puts feelings and thoughts into words...
Review: I stumbled upon the book-on-tape version of this book a few years ago, and found myself having to pull over on the side of the road because I was crying so much. The incredibly young age of the author, in combination with her ability to put these intense feelings into words, makes this an amazing book. I had just lost my mother about a year prior to reading this novel. While losing a mother and losing a husband are not the same, one cannot compare grief. I distinctly remember thinking "oh my god- she's saying what I've been feeling and unable to say". Overall, an excellent, intense book.
Rating: 
Summary: Please.
Review: I think alot of people look at this book and think this is not a good book about grief. But ofcourse it is not I don't believe it is suppose to be, and if you read this book with hopeing that you will learn something about grief from it, then you are reading it for all the wrong reasons. I actually found this book by accident. I was looking up books on leukemia and stumbled on it. I bought it used and say all the great feedback it was getting and also some negative so I decided to give it a try. I think this book is more or less a story of a woman coming to terms with her life, and what it took to get her where she is. I think it also gives alot of young adults a look at what a truly relationship is like, and the pain and agony that you go through when your time is cut short with that person. You know it is different to just end a marriage through divorce because you know that person still exist, but when someones life is cut short then it is quite a bit more difficult.
Rating: 
Summary: A book about Grief?
Review: I think alot of people look at this book and think this is not a good book about grief. But ofcourse it is not I don't believe it is suppose to be, and if you read this book with hopeing that you will learn something about grief from it, then you are reading it for all the wrong reasons. I actually found this book by accident. I was looking up books on leukemia and stumbled on it. I bought it used and say all the great feedback it was getting and also some negative so I decided to give it a try. I think this book is more or less a story of a woman coming to terms with her life, and what it took to get her where she is. I think it also gives alot of young adults a look at what a truly relationship is like, and the pain and agony that you go through when your time is cut short with that person. You know it is different to just end a marriage through divorce because you know that person still exist, but when someones life is cut short then it is quite a bit more difficult.
Rating:
Summary: A Modern Mary Shelley Writer
Review: I was overwhelmed when I first read Jenn Crowell's Necessary Madness at the sense of maturity in a writer so young. I have heard people say that "one has an old soul;" however, until I encountered this book, I had never believed that statement to be true. Crowell's intensity and emotional outpouring is enough to make any man, woman or child understand and FEEL the emotion at the deepest levels possible. I HIGHLY recommend it!
Rating:
Summary: Exquisite
Review: I've read this book five or six times and it still reads like new every time. Jenn Crowell's talent amazes me: she was only seventeen when she wrote the book, she's never been married or had a child or lived in London, and yet all her words read authentically. Crowell is able to get inside Gloria's head and tell us the reader exactly what is going on, sympathetically and artistically. The characters are well-developed, the plot is fascinating, and the stylistic device--chapters in the present alternating with those set in the past--melds the book together seamlessly. I recommend this book to anyone and everyone.
Rating: 
Summary: A fine first novel
Review: Just seventeen when she wrote NECESSARY MADNESS, Jenn Crowell has fashioned a novel wise beyond her years. Her ability to tap into the deep, maddening ache of grief belies her age.
Gloria, while studying abroad in England, falls in love and marries a British painter, Bill, who is gentle and thoughtful and unpretensious. They are happy, gloriously happy: Bill paints and Gloria teaches. They conceive a son and life seems good, too good. Then Bill suffers from a loss of energy and bruises on his arms. Tests reveal cancer. Slowly, he dies. Gloria, bereft and adrift, tries to carry on, but she is unable to contain an unpredictable emotionality.
Since the book opens on the day of the funeral, we learn through flashbacks the history of their relationship as well as the history of Gloria's dysfunctional family -- a cloying father and a resentfully shrill mother, an American and a Brit, like Gloria and Bill.
This is curious territory for the debut novel of a college sophomore, though she handles it admirably, stopping just short of maudlin, mawkish sentiment. Her writing and pace are superb. She has a good sense of how to tell a story but falters in handling characters. Too often they fall short of the complexity and depth we expect (Gloria is the exception). Relationships often seem unsubstantiated, rushed, and one-dimensional. For example, Gloria's deep disaffection for her mother seemed unjustified and puzzled me.
Overall, I found the work engaging and worthwhile; its strengths overshadowed its soft spots.
Rating:
Summary: Please.
Review: Like so many others, I picked up this book based entirely on the fact that the writer was supposedly seventeen when she wrote it. From the first page, I was drooling with boredom. Actually- after the first paragraphy I was drooling with boredom, before that I was too incensed to drool. Crowell's premature style leaves a lot to be desired in the way of artfulness, subtlety and, most of all, originality. It's great that she can keep the plot moving along (as one editorial put it), but she didn't seem to concern herself with the accurate logistics of those points she dwelled on. The England details were so generic and Fodor's that I don't see why anyone'd boast that she wrote this book without having visited the country, first- or spent some time with its people. The poor son came in and out of the story on whim- I would've liked to see more focus on the mother-son relationship. I've read somewhere that Madison Bell, who "discovered this gem" (how I loathe those words), read it and thought immediately of its marketability. I wish he'd instead thought of the girl who'd written it, spent a little more time encouraging her as a writer and getting the book up to standard (whatever that means these days) before FedExing it to his agent. Frankly, his haste doesn't speak too highly of his judge of quality. And can I just say here (stop reading if you want) that I am not impressed with the OVERALL quality of "young prodigy writers" which have been published in the past few years? These poor kids are raking in nearly a million dollars before or shortly after they've hit twenty, but time will tell that they've been ruined. If Crowell had been twenty-three, or graduated from some stinking MFA program with that manuscript and scouted it out, she would've had a much more difficult time finding a publisher. And rightfully so. As a reader, I'm disappointed with the standards of the entire industry.
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