Canada Reads, book 4: "The Woo Woo"

  
  This is another book that brings out differing opinions.  I have just read three five-star reviews of this book that call it "darkly comedic", and they enjoyed it greatly.
   I thought it was a horrific story and I could not wait to finish it.
  The author, Lindsay Wong, writes about her childhood in Vancouver, where mental illness reigns supreme in her extended Chinese family!  Her grandmother is a paranoid schizophrenic.  There were 8 connected families (70 people) who all seem to be suffering with ghosts and demons possessing them (the Woo Woo).


Quotes:
  "In that moment I was very aware that my mother might not ever fully recover.  And I was scared that we were all going to be spastic, cosmic orphans, pathetic little planets spinning non-stop, if my father didn't pull himself together and teach us how to effectively orbit around our out-in-space mother."
   "I was beginning to realize that the madness in our DNA was a life-threatening disease, transmitted like a pesky airborne infection, attacking and mutating the pink and grey confetti cells of the brain."
  "We were a product of untreated mental illness that had escalated for generations".

Lindsay Wong

   


  There are 300 pages of descriptions of dysfunction that is extreme and bizarre.   Somehow, the author managed to graduate from Columbia University with an MFA and now is an author who has won many awards. 
  She always was afraid that she would follow her mother and grandmother in being taken over by ghosts and demons, but actually her sickness has been identified as "migraine-related vestibulopathy".