Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Somewhere, sometime, somebody failed me. How is it I had never read Flowers for Algernon until now? Even my youngest kids say they read it in eighth grade, and they almost never read anything.

I make my AP Literature seniors do a tapestry of books they’ve read at the end of the year. A lot of them had Keyes’ novel on their tapestries. Then, Flowers for Algernon played an important role in Nicola Yoon’s Everything, Everything. So, it was like Fate decided it was time I read this novel. I’m glad I finally did.

This is the story of Charly Gordon, a mentally retarded man who undergoes experimental surgery and in the course of a couple of months becomes a genius smarter than the university professors who operated on him. Now there are two Charlies. The old one, innocent, kind, naive, and mentally handicapped, and the new one, arrogant, immature, violent, but brilliant. And there’s a running clock when Charly finds the flaw in the professors’ experiment.

That’s the plot. The real story is about what it means to be human. The professors see Charly as a lab specimen. Charly’s old “friends” see him as a buffoon there for their entertainment. Charly, meanwhile, who only wanted to be smart before the operation, struggles to reconcile the person he was with the person he is … and the person he’s becoming.

This is a wonderful, but very sad novel. It’s a book that will make you look at yourself, your attitude, and question what is important in your life.

I listened to this as an audio book. Jeff Woodman did a brilliant job. As retarded Charly struggled with spelling, I thought at first I was missing out by not seeing the text, but Woodman’s narration more than made up for anything I might have missed by not reading the words myself.

I highly recommend this book, either in print or audio.

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