“Totally gorgeous book where the story starts maybe just a tad too late. What I mean is, I plowed through about 25 pages before it got to the core and completely broke my heart. After that I was hooked, and it delivered. But the first little bit seemed almost like it was a little too gritty somehow. In retrospect, the grit helps heighten the vulnerable parts later, but I think it took me a little too long to figure out where the book was going. But once I did, totally worth it, and this is one of the rare titles that I recommend reading a little further than you might want to at first. It’s not the speediest start, but the meat is worth it.
It has some dreamlike, hallucinatory stuff in it, but it totally works, which is a rarity. Why does it work?
Let’s go back to why these things don’t work.
I knew that one of my writing teachers was one of my favorites because he thinks dreams in writing are kinda bullshitty. Because a dream can be anything. And nobody wants to hear about your dreams. We all know that, right? By the way, if you had an amazing dream and you have to tell someone about it, and if you know they’re not interested, tell them they were in the dream. Then just arbitrarily insert them in somewhere. We don’t CARE about other peoples’ dreams, but we are still sort of flattered to make an appearance.
The visions in this book work differently for a couple reasons.
First, they’re rendered in a very concrete way. We know what the character is perceiving, exactly, no question. It’s very unambiguous, and that makes them work because while what’s happening is not normal, the way events are broken down make me certain of where we are in space, whose body we’re occupying, and so on.
Second, it’s very clear that these are hallucinations. No bullshit about maybe they’re real, maybe they’re not. They are unequivocally not real. No Field of Dreams bullshit.
Third, They don’t provide the character information he doesn’t already have. We use hallucinatory events as a way of connecting to identity and past events, but the character doesn’t learn anything he doesn’t already know. He doesn’t see events that he was not a part of before. This works, it’s logical. I don’t want to read a hallucination where a kid sees his parents fighting when, in reality, he wasn’t even there. That’s a cheat.
That’s a very quick summary because I don’t want to ruin the book. But it’s the rare book that gets a thumbs up from me and features some heavy unreal elements.”