Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (Chris Bohjalian)

 I didn't love this and as a result, didn't finish it. While I was interested in the dystopian type story with the nuclear disaster, I really felt gross about her stories of being homeless. I didn't feel good reading this book and that's not what I'm really looking for in a book. 

However, this was a book club pick and I did appreciate the discussion and am glad for book club because it forces me to read things I would not otherwise. I felt like they made some good points that I could consider to face these types of stories....namely empathy. 

The title of the book was a very powerful image. It came from the school shooting in CT. I found a fantastic article that spoke of this:

Adults hid themselves and the children in closets, in cupboards, under desks, behind file cabinets. When it was over, police had to lead the surviving children past the carnage that was their now lifeless classmates and teachers. They told the children, “Close your eyes. Hold hands” as they ushered them to safety.

That’s a powerful image.

Goodreads says:

A heartbreaking, wildly inventive, and moving novel narrated by a teenage runaway, from the best-selling author of Midwives and The Sandcastle Girls.

Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands is the story of Emily Shepard, a homeless teen living in an igloo made of ice and trash bags filled with frozen leaves. Half a year earlier, a nuclear plant in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom had experienced a cataclysmic meltdown, and both of Emily's parents were killed. Devastatingly, her father was in charge of the plant, and the meltdown may have been his fault. Was he drunk when it happened? Thousands of people are forced to flee their homes in the Kingdom; rivers and forests are destroyed; and Emily feels certain that, as the daughter of the most hated man in America, she is in danger. So instead of following the social workers and her classmates after the meltdown, Emily takes off on her own for Burlington, where she survives by stealing, sleeping on the floor of a drug dealer's apartment, and inventing a new identity for herself - an identity inspired by her favorite poet, Emily Dickinson. When Emily befriends a young homeless boy named Cameron, she protects him with a ferocity she didn't know she had. But she still can't outrun her past, can't escape her grief, can't hide forever - and so she comes up with the only plan that she can.

A story of loss, adventure, and the search for friendship in the wake of catastrophe, Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands is one of Chris Bohjalian's finest novels to date - breathtaking, wise, and utterly transporting.