A Life

Charlie Si Jenius Dungu by Daniel Keyes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Title: Flowers for Algernon (Indonesian title: Charlie Si Jenius Dungu)
Author: Daniel Keyes
Publisher: Ufuk Press
Pages: 457 pages
Published: 2010

"Flowers for Algernon" follows the story of Charlie, a janitor with IQ 68. An experiment successfully raised his IQ to 185. As Charlie grows smarter, his world becomes wider and he realizes various things about friendship, love, people, and about himself.

As Algernon, his mouse partner in the same experiment, starts to revert to its original brain's capacity and eventually dead, will Charlie face the same fate?

Review

I love this book! I love the author's idea to show Charlie's low IQ through Charlie's early report where he frequently misspells and only know one punctuation, the full stop.

As Charlie becomes smarter, his writing becomes more complex and he uses various punctuations, showing his intellectual growth. He also becomes aware of himself and people around him and how his wish-came-true to be smarter doesn't bring him the happiness he wanted.

An interesting story with interesting execution and great conclusion. No wonder it won both the Hugo and Nebula Award.

This book is for the following reading challenge:
- 2013 TBR Pile
- 2013 What's in A Name Reading Challenge

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