This is a melancholy little book about what it means to live almost forever. Think “Interview with a Vampire” without vampires. Tom Hazard, a man of many names and times, is over 400 years old. Tom is not immortal but ages VERY slowly. The explanation for this is some kind of genetic thing that kicks in at puberty, physically aging those with the gene around 10 years for every 100. The obvious things occur here: watching loved ones age and die, constantly moving and changing identities initially to avoid superstitious village […]
Thoughts have wings.
This one is an interesting look at the relationships of four siblings through the lens of one shared experience in childhood. After hearing that a fortune-teller in the neighborhood can tell you the exact date of your death, Daniel (11) coaxed his siblings Varya (13), Klara (9) and Simon (7) to pay her a visit. Four bored kids looking for something to pass the time in the hot city summer are each given a date that will shape the trajectory of their lives. They began […]
Always Mañana. Tomorrow.
Young Adult fiction has been in heavy rotation in my reading for a good number of years now. Now that my kid is in middle school, I have a lot of really great books to pass on to him, but I have found that the bulk of it (aside from vampirey melodrama which I am sure he will have zero interest in) are dystopian trilogies. He flew through the Westerfeld Leviathan books (if anyone can recommend steampunk books appropriate for a middle schooler, let me […]
A boy and his parrot.
I’m a fan of a Michael Chabon. “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” is an amazing book. “Telegraph Avenue” is one of my favorites as well. Those are serious tomes, so I was interested in reading this little book to see how he manages to encapsulate his general style of verbose prose into a novella. In 1944, a retired British detective in his twilight years is raising bees at his small cottage in the English countryside. He becomes involved in the investigation of a […]
Another man’s fate.
The story’s premise sounded promising: a young family from Cameroon try to make a life for themselves in New York City just before the bottom falls out of stock market and on the brink of swearing-in the first African-American President of the United States. Jende works hard at his new job as a chauffeur for a big shot at Lehman Brothers. Neni takes care of their young son, Liomi, while studying around the clock in hopes of getting into pharmacy school. The narrative alternates between the […]
Like my marrow could carry a bruise.
I couldn’t decide if this was a book that I needed to digest a little before I tried to review it. Ultimately, I decided to write about it immediately after finishing it, while it still clung to me. This is definitely a book that clings to you. It’s not an easy book to read and it shouldn’t be. The bulk of the story is a somber road trip that takes place over a few days, trapped inside a hot car in the American south. When Michael […]