I enjoyed this book, and how it takes a long hard look at dying. Any consideration of death should also include a fair examination of life – the balanced approach. This book nicely balanced both, and it was a pleasure to read.
There are a lot of kind people in this book. Maybe it has been my choices of books lately, but I am always expecting a villain. There are some grumpy people in this one but nobody we can point at and hiss. Well, unless you count the Grim Reaper.
The story is pieced together nicely in a structure that makes memories and events come to you as they do to the main character – in a kind of recollection. I kept expecting something horrible to happen but I was pleased that things turned out the way they did. The author’s writing style is surprisingly easy to read – I felt like I was flying through the pages.
There is one scene in particular that stuck with me, when the main character and her stepfather Eddie crash a wedding in New York City, and it was the kind of magical moment that you’d expect from Manhattan. A lot of the book takes place in this sort of storybook New York, and while people travel upstate to Westchester or casually drop into the Metropolitan Museum of Art we rarely see the grit of the city. We rarely see grit, to be honest. The story moves briskly from one positive development to the next, and I felt like we were just getting the cream, which bothered me a little.
Take Eddie, the long lost stepfather, who is so perfect in just about every way. The way he was written had me worried that we were setting him up to be some sort of monster later on. Nobody is that perfect – not even the Pope.
But I did enjoy the book and got lots of good quotes out of it. Not my usual style, but fun nonetheless.
Next I am reading The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel.
