Why? You need to tread carefully........it's a minefield of pretension and ego-inflated poseurs........with hordes of creative writing graduate students disgorging indigestible prose, impenetrable plotting and pages sprinkled with words they mined from their 50 pound Thesauruses....(Thesauri??)
But this one's a goodie.
If I were a crude Hollywood spin-meister searching for an easy description.......the book falls somewhere between 'Crocodile Dundee' and 'Sophie's Choice'........
It's 1968 out in Australia farmland and sheep farmer Tom Hope's mercurial wife has fled the marriage, taking along her adorable little boy Peter.....who was fathered by another man.
Having established a deep father-son bond with Peter, Tom's left lonely and crushed.......until he falls in love with Hannah Babel, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, who's arrived to open an unlikely bookshop in a community that barely reads........
Do I even have to describe how deep the emotions run here? While Tom slowly rediscovers life and love, Hannah, haunted and destroyed by the concentration camp death of her own young son, can only give so much of herself to him......
Not enough angst for you? Tom's ex-wife and Peter have landed in a frightening, hellish evangelical Christian commune........where the little boy so beloved by Tom is now being regularly beaten by the commune's vile, cruel Pastor.
Get the drift? You'll choke up, tear up and you won't be able to flip the pages fast enough. The pacing may strike you as a bit measured, but you'll want to stay with it.........in its Dickensian turns of plot, you'll want to hang in to see everyone get what's coming to them.......both good and bad.
Not the kind of book BQ usually cracks open, but well, well worth it.........say 'G'Day Mate' to this one for sure. 4 stars (****)
No comments:
Post a Comment