Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.38 AVERAGE
3.38 AVERAGE
dark
funny
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Local police officer Ray Tatum is the ostensible main character of Polar, but it’s hard to tell at times, given the outsized (nameless) narrator who commands most of our attention. Yes, there’s a missing little girl and yes, there’s a weary local cop who is compelled for both professional and personal reasons to find out what happened to her, and yes, there are colorful local characters and side-stories galore. If you’ve read Pearson in the past, you know what you’re in for. For context, however, Polar follows Blue Ridge, the second novel that features Ray Tatum as well as his cousin Paul Tatum. In Blue Ridge, there are counterpoint narrators, a third-person who tells Ray’s story and Paul who tells his own, creating a balanced duality both in form and character that serves to both enrich each character and sustain the delicate architecture of the narrative. The details of the narration of Blue Ridge are relevant only in the fact that Polar offers a further departure in narrative form, in that our first-person narrator is nameless, a self-important and often mean-spirited auteur who tells the story, it seems, not for the details of the missing Dunn girl or for the insights he has to offer about Ray Tatum and the local color, but because he is directing his own creative vision. The result is a tapestry of transformation, with each of the major characters undergoing some deep and fundamental change, for better and worse, in the context of an indifferent and self-interested media-driven society more interested in exploiting the vulnerable and the foolish than in fully comprehending the implications of a missing little girl. As is typically the case with Pearson, there are plenty of laughs, but reader beware: Polar is dark, cynical, and biting. Indeed, there’s little redemption and even less warmth between these pages than you might otherwise expect. Aside from the narrator’s tentative attempt to tidy things up, the end offers little resolution. Polar is, nevertheless, wholly satisfying, shot through with melancholy and loss, tweaking, in the end, perhaps a little transformation if not redemption for the determined reader.
What a find! Pearson's writing is excellent literature, brilliant observation and really funny.
TR Pearson's narrator, one of the locals from the unnamed Virginia town, weaves a story that is as much observation of human character as the story of Deputy Ray's search for a missing little girl, and unkempt and socially illiterate Clayton's transformation to cryptic prophet. His descriptions are magnificent . . . "They were the Sapps from down the pike. You can hardly hope to mistake a Sapp around here as they are, all of them, impossibly hairy and given to moles and chinlessness. The females have sideburns and brush mustaches. The men all sport eyebrows that meet."
I will definitely be reading more Pearson.
TR Pearson's narrator, one of the locals from the unnamed Virginia town, weaves a story that is as much observation of human character as the story of Deputy Ray's search for a missing little girl, and unkempt and socially illiterate Clayton's transformation to cryptic prophet. His descriptions are magnificent . . . "They were the Sapps from down the pike. You can hardly hope to mistake a Sapp around here as they are, all of them, impossibly hairy and given to moles and chinlessness. The females have sideburns and brush mustaches. The men all sport eyebrows that meet."
I will definitely be reading more Pearson.
Sadly, I couldn't finish this book either... maybe I need to come back to it another time.
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Confused.
Best of the non-Neelys by far. I even coerced a reading group full of women to read this one. Without me - I ain't part of no womany book club. Except this site...
Every computer programmer learns about the "stack" data structure in Computer Science 101. If you have a stack, you can stick a piece of information onto it (we geeks say you've "pushed" the information). Then you can push something else, and so forth, as many times as you like, or until your computer runs out of memory. If you want to get a piece of information back from the stack ("pop"), it better be the last one you pushed, because that's the only piece of information that is accessible on a stack. I could re-state this whole paragraph more economically:
Stacks are referred to as LIFO data structures--last in, first out. The analogy is to--and the name comes from--a stack of dishes.
In a way, reading T.R. Pearson's work is like reading a stack. You start reading a story, but before it's finished, another story gets pushed, and sometimes, another, then maybe another. The stories in this book, like most of the others by Mr. Pearson that I've read so far, pour out, gush out onto the pages. They tumble over each other in their rush to get told. Some of them are short and some are long. Sometimes they get overlaid on each other so that, by the time all of those stories unwind--get popped off the stack--you've almost forgotten the story that started that particular stack! That's part of the fun of reading these books; if you need a strictly linear rendering of plot in your books, you might not like this style. This book is more about characterization and local color and, of course, storytelling, than it is about plot.
I enjoy reading Mr. Pearson's work a lot. Polar seemed a little more diffuse than others of his. For whatever reason, I didn't find myself slowing down towards the end of the book, trying to delay the inevitable end, like I so often do with books I enjoy the most.
Recommended.
stack.pop(stack.push(x)) = x;
Stacks are referred to as LIFO data structures--last in, first out. The analogy is to--and the name comes from--a stack of dishes.
In a way, reading T.R. Pearson's work is like reading a stack. You start reading a story, but before it's finished, another story gets pushed, and sometimes, another, then maybe another. The stories in this book, like most of the others by Mr. Pearson that I've read so far, pour out, gush out onto the pages. They tumble over each other in their rush to get told. Some of them are short and some are long. Sometimes they get overlaid on each other so that, by the time all of those stories unwind--get popped off the stack--you've almost forgotten the story that started that particular stack! That's part of the fun of reading these books; if you need a strictly linear rendering of plot in your books, you might not like this style. This book is more about characterization and local color and, of course, storytelling, than it is about plot.
I enjoy reading Mr. Pearson's work a lot. Polar seemed a little more diffuse than others of his. For whatever reason, I didn't find myself slowing down towards the end of the book, trying to delay the inevitable end, like I so often do with books I enjoy the most.
Recommended.
I couldn't finish this and that is a great disappointment to me because [b:Blue Ridge|358703|Blue Ridge|T.R. Pearson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174075829s/358703.jpg|1844120], the book that features the same main characters was superb. This one meandered and was told from the pov of a faceless character who told the story in a personal observation fashion that at first was quite arresting with some real laugh-out-loud moments but soon became tedious.
I really, really wanted to love this book and didn't.
I really, really wanted to love this book and didn't.
In Polar, T.R Pearson paints this fantastic picture of a township that puts the fun and funny in dysfunctional, well, most of the time. While some would call them hillbillies or simple folk, Pearson turns a very small story about a child's abduction into an epic of Homeric detail about every person and family that somehow sticks their head into the tale. Hard to put down, will probably incite some laugh out loud moments, if there wasn't a bit of drag near the end this would have been 5 stars.
I went to an all-Texas MeetUp in Austin last weekend.
Texas BookCrossers came from all parts to eat lunch
together and swap book stories.
"What's your all-time must-read-before-you-die book?"
I asked.
Two different BookCrossers named books by T.R. Pearson.
Each was amazed to find there was another Pearson fan
in the immediate vicinity.
So, well, mercy, I had to read Polar, a book that's been
languishing in my TBR for months.
JennyO described this book perfectly at the MeetUp.
"It's the kind of book where the author rambles around
for forty pages and has actually written two pages of
plot." Moreover, JennyO went on, "T.R. Pearson writes
like your grandma sitting on the backporch in the
summertime talks."
Recommended.
Texas BookCrossers came from all parts to eat lunch
together and swap book stories.
"What's your all-time must-read-before-you-die book?"
I asked.
Two different BookCrossers named books by T.R. Pearson.
Each was amazed to find there was another Pearson fan
in the immediate vicinity.
So, well, mercy, I had to read Polar, a book that's been
languishing in my TBR for months.
JennyO described this book perfectly at the MeetUp.
"It's the kind of book where the author rambles around
for forty pages and has actually written two pages of
plot." Moreover, JennyO went on, "T.R. Pearson writes
like your grandma sitting on the backporch in the
summertime talks."
Recommended.