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A review by lorettalucia
Edgar and Lucy by Victor Lodato
5.0
"Learning kindness late in life was a kind of torture. The pain often came from the past, from kindnesses withheld. The knife was particularly sharp when those who most deserved your kindness were long gone. And unless you want to die of sorrow, you had to give this unspent kindness to those you loved less."
Wow.
I'm not even positive where to begin. This book was not what I would call a pleasant read, but that was because I was so fully immersed into this world, so tensed by its occurrences, that the real world began to seem uninspiring by comparison.
Constantly changing and surprising--truly surprising--this book has the unpredictability only provided by master storytellers. At various points, I found myself sizing up the story thus far, trying to get a general shape of what I thought would happen next, and inevitably I was wrong. At times, it truly seems to have the feeling where it's so outlandish that it has to be true--because who would be able to come up with a story like that?
The characters are unique but lived in. The kind of people I would meet and think I could pigeonhole or stereotype pretty easily--after all, I've spent more than my fair share of time in New Jersey. But the author digs deeper, lifting up layer under layer. These people both fulfilled their stereotypes and transcended them.
The genre is impossible to define. Is it a thriller? A ghost story? With its beautiful and profound statements, is it experimental literary fiction? Or is it something else altogether, a story that simply needed to be told, working its will until it poured out of the author? All I know is that it will wiggle around in my head for quite a long time.
Somehow, through the use of baroque prose, the author turned the State of New Jersey into a land where ghosts, devils and angels fight over the fates of the living, where the wilds and paranormal are barely beaten back by the progress of human civilization, where mysteries will remain unsolved by science for generations or eons to come.
I loved this book. Really, I found it deeply unpleasant in many ways, messy as love can be, but my goodness did I love it.
5 very enthusiastic stars.
Wow.
I'm not even positive where to begin. This book was not what I would call a pleasant read, but that was because I was so fully immersed into this world, so tensed by its occurrences, that the real world began to seem uninspiring by comparison.
Constantly changing and surprising--truly surprising--this book has the unpredictability only provided by master storytellers. At various points, I found myself sizing up the story thus far, trying to get a general shape of what I thought would happen next, and inevitably I was wrong. At times, it truly seems to have the feeling where it's so outlandish that it has to be true--because who would be able to come up with a story like that?
The characters are unique but lived in. The kind of people I would meet and think I could pigeonhole or stereotype pretty easily--after all, I've spent more than my fair share of time in New Jersey. But the author digs deeper, lifting up layer under layer. These people both fulfilled their stereotypes and transcended them.
The genre is impossible to define. Is it a thriller? A ghost story? With its beautiful and profound statements, is it experimental literary fiction? Or is it something else altogether, a story that simply needed to be told, working its will until it poured out of the author? All I know is that it will wiggle around in my head for quite a long time.
Somehow, through the use of baroque prose, the author turned the State of New Jersey into a land where ghosts, devils and angels fight over the fates of the living, where the wilds and paranormal are barely beaten back by the progress of human civilization, where mysteries will remain unsolved by science for generations or eons to come.
I loved this book. Really, I found it deeply unpleasant in many ways, messy as love can be, but my goodness did I love it.
5 very enthusiastic stars.