Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes was a book recommended by Felix Kjellberg, one of my favourite Youtubers. I borrowed it from the library and it was the first book I read after coming back from summer vacation.

SYNOPSIS
Charlie Gordon is retarded. He has poor memory and is bullied by his coworkers and family. But he makes up for this with his dedication to trying to become smart. He regularly attends classes to improve his reading and writing skills. Then he is chosen to be the first to receive a surgery that would increase his intelligence. It is successful, and his IQ improves by alarming speeds, surpassing even the scientists who operated on him. He adopts a disdainful attitude of people less smart than he, but soon realizes that he is just as far from people when he is a genius as when he was retarded.

WHAT I LIKED

• Well-written and well-researched
• Heartbreaking and strewed my emotions all over the place
• Explores the issue of ethics in treating people who are mentally incapable of giving consent
• Very human

WHAT I DISLIKED

• I feel like Fay is a bad character portrayed as a good one. She’s nice and I quite like her, but I think she’s very self-destructive. Her house is a mess, there’s no lock on the door, she’s not the slightest bit concerned over losing three hundred bucks, and she doesn’t have any long-term loves/friendships. There’s absolutely no stability. She even loses Charlie once he stops being fun.

Despite that long-winded paragraph on Fay, I do really like this book. I’m glad it was recommended to me, and I’m sure I’ll still think about it ten years from now.