Book Review #7

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 Book Review

Whip and Spur

Written by Iver Arnegard


  Love and hate. Joy and sorrow. Intensity and numbness. Both are in the whip and spur.
  I have a bias  in favor of this book. Whip and Spur comes from Iver Arnegard, who is one of my favorite instructors at the college I attended (the other being Juan Morales). With that in mind, I read Whip and Spur for a second time. 

  My basic notes:

  - Whip and Spur feels vulnerable and raw to the experiences of love an individual can have. A lot of them are not pleasant experiences, but they are still important to recognize and feel through this book. 

  - There may be a tone in Whip and Spur that makes how the main protagonist expresses themselves feel as distant and cold as the environments they find themselves in. It feels like a theme for this book, but I am not certain due to my own biases in reading books through the perspective of their authors (which sometimes is what you need to do, but -more often than not- you need to kind of avoid). 

  - Each story is contained in its own world, which is a nice changed from the writing I normally do that interweaves places and characters. As nice as the connections feel, a book like this benefits from having the isolated stories and the isolated characters in their own little worlds. 

  In the end, I enjoyed this book. A lot of what I felt during my life felt really understood through these pages and through the words Arnegard put to them. The isolated experiences remind me how I felt during certain relationships, and seeing his protagonists cope and come around to dealing with their feelings about it brought me a bit of hope about how I can cope and deal with my own things in life -not just relationships. 

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