HeyAinaaa's Reviews > The Chameleon

It’s common for readers to be obsessed with a book. But have you ever seen a book become obsessed with a human? That is John, and he is this book.

I honestly don’t know how to properly put my thoughts about the book into words, but I know that I love everything about it! The story is told from the perspective of the soul of a book, John, as we time travel with him to show his life spent with other humans and why and how he is utterly in love with Roger, the current owner, and his story.

John is unlike other books that we see and read. He is literally a chameleon; he adapts to his environment as he changes from cover to cover. And he doesn’t only simply change his skin; he would change and restructure the words and sentences to capture the reader’s attention. Basically, he is the book that a reader would desperately need at that moment of time.

I love everything about John. He can be serious, witty, and very dramatic. Especially his dramatics in being extremely envious of other words written by Roger. Yes, he was jealous of Roger’s memoir diary that he wrote! And his terrible memory, as well as being sidetracked because, as he captures your mind by beginning a story from the past, he becomes sidetracked and begins another. I was so frustrated. But I promise everything will tie together in the end.

I do think that his forgetful memory is mirrored by Roger, as he is old and on his death bed (not a spoiler, it’s in the synopsis). So as I kept reading, I kind of realize and speculated that John might be old and also dying? It’s really interesting to me because in the end, you’ll get to know what John was desiring all along, which was never to be bound and to be other books telling other people’s stories. It was something that he wanted and that most humans desire to be preserved. Also, the part about how he came into existence was super interesting too!

The main thing that had bamboozled me was actually the cover, which is part of a painting called The Landscape and the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel. It’s as if John was already telling me before I began reading that his stories are fragmented, or that I will only see one part of the whole picture because there are certain important parts of his story that he could not remember or failed to mention in the beginning because of his old mind. "You can punish yourself for inaction; I can only fault my inattention." Am I making sense with this? I have no idea, but that’s just how I felt.

The writing in this book was phenomenal to me; it has a lot of depth and layers, great use of metaphors and analogies, and it makes you stop and think, going back to the previous pages to see what other hidden things I have missed to fully understand the whole book. It was definitely a great book to start off the year for me.