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3.64 AVERAGE
3.64 AVERAGE
Strange but Sweet
This was kind of a strange and random story but enjoyable. The book is written almost as a play or movie script. I liked all the animals.
This was kind of a strange and random story but enjoyable. The book is written almost as a play or movie script. I liked all the animals.
I really LOVED this story. At first the unique format bothered me a little, then I got into a rhythm with it and found it totally worked. You learn so much about the wonderful man who tells the story through these brief entries: his marriage, his values, his fathering, his musings, the meaning of family. The poignant ending brought tears to my eyes. Never read anything like it!
This was a very interesting book and I especially liked the format. I thought it was interesting, new, creative, and beautiful. I liked it very much!
I really enjoyed this book. The format and language was simple, but this book was stunning and moving. The way the narrator straightforwardly told us about his veterinarian calls, the action taken, plus his thoughts on the way home was wonderful. It was neat to see the difference between his thoughts and what he actually said as well as his reflections on life as he drove home from his visits to take care of animals. The quiet tension in the book keeps the reader engaged and wanting to know more.
got bored after 50 pages
i prefer dialogue to internal monologue
but it did have a few great lines
i prefer dialogue to internal monologue
but it did have a few great lines
I ended up really liking this book, and at first I didn't think I would even be able to read it in the format it was written..... the only thing I struggled with was some of the calls he went on because I am a little overly sensitive to animal suffering/death...... but I loved their life, the way they sorted things through, and the son, was he amazing or what?! Very different type of book, enjoyed it very much.
I might be rating this one a little high? I'm not sure, and some of it will depend on how this one wears over the weeks as I read other books. Will it leave an impression? I don't know.
So, the big picture is that this is the story of a large animal vet whose son goes into a coma after a hunting accident. The narrator has a philosophical turn already, and the accident adds to it, as does a variety of other narrative stuff-- the calls he goes on as a vet; his home life; an apparent spaceship circling his house; his house itself, with it's unconventional construction.
The novel considers, but never quite turns itself pretzel-shaped in its consideration of justice and revenge: how much energy should the narrator give to finding who shot his son and making the shooter pay, somehow. Is it better to forgive, or at least move on? And while the plotted resolution of that storyline is satisfying as a narrative pay-off, so is the thought processes that make the ending almost a foregone conclusion.
But I'm dancing around the big thing here, which is the tone and/or style of the novel, which is all reported-- it's not quite writing in a journal at the end of the night, recounting events, but it comes close to that. And it introduces real distance here, which I found occasionally interesting and occasionally troubling: in short, I didn't know how to read the narrator-- is he a cold fish and should he feel more bloodlust, or his emotional state, recollected in tranquility, totally the right response? I feel a little bit like Wayne Booth here, taking out my collapsible pointer and drawing attention to the unknowable gulf between the words and the story they relate-- the novel exists in that space between. But I'm not sure what to think of that space-- is it a triumph or a failure, a crystalline space for observation or a vacuum that muffles the emotional voice of the novel? I think it's an an interesting writerly problem, but I wonder if it's interesting, or productive, in this particular case....
So, the big picture is that this is the story of a large animal vet whose son goes into a coma after a hunting accident. The narrator has a philosophical turn already, and the accident adds to it, as does a variety of other narrative stuff-- the calls he goes on as a vet; his home life; an apparent spaceship circling his house; his house itself, with it's unconventional construction.
The novel considers, but never quite turns itself pretzel-shaped in its consideration of justice and revenge: how much energy should the narrator give to finding who shot his son and making the shooter pay, somehow. Is it better to forgive, or at least move on? And while the plotted resolution of that storyline is satisfying as a narrative pay-off, so is the thought processes that make the ending almost a foregone conclusion.
But I'm dancing around the big thing here, which is the tone and/or style of the novel, which is all reported-- it's not quite writing in a journal at the end of the night, recounting events, but it comes close to that. And it introduces real distance here, which I found occasionally interesting and occasionally troubling: in short, I didn't know how to read the narrator-- is he a cold fish and should he feel more bloodlust, or his emotional state, recollected in tranquility, totally the right response? I feel a little bit like Wayne Booth here, taking out my collapsible pointer and drawing attention to the unknowable gulf between the words and the story they relate-- the novel exists in that space between. But I'm not sure what to think of that space-- is it a triumph or a failure, a crystalline space for observation or a vacuum that muffles the emotional voice of the novel? I think it's an an interesting writerly problem, but I wonder if it's interesting, or productive, in this particular case....
Like an epistolary novel, but better! I loved hearing about the veterinarian's calls, and there was (for me) just the right balance of tension (about his kid in a coma and about who did it and whether his marriage was going to fall apart) and humor (the calls, his wife's transmissions from the UFO, his silly kids). Short & quick & satisfying.
The disparate style was annoying at first but turned into a first rate story!