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emtobiasz 's review for:
Falling Out of Time
by David Grossman
This book was an extremely touching story on the mourning of lost children by their parents. It's written as a script, with most characters speaking in poetry. I think this would be very powerful as an audiobook/readers' theater performance. In print form I often wondered how it would sound out loud. I probably would have enjoyed it more in an aural format.
For me as a reader, several things fell slightly flat. First, the second half of the book, after the walkers hit the wall, became repetitive and lost my interest. Because of this, I had trouble understanding why the characters acted as they did at the end, and why the book concluded as it did. Second, because all characters were mourning the loss of a child, the scope of its statements on death felt limited. I understand that the author, David Grossman, was mourning the loss of his child, and from that standpoint it makes sense not to try to overreach that very personal experience. For another reader in precisely that position-- mourning the loss of a child, a few years removed from the tragedy but still coping with the loss-- I can imagine that this could be a very relevant, even therapeutic, read. But because of my own distance from that particular form of mourning, I felt the distance from the characters. It wasn't so much that the observations shared and feelings expressed weren't universal to mourners of anyone lost, it was that we as readers were never invited to see them as such. For that reason, I felt cut off from what I could have gotten out of it. I still very much enjoyed the experience of reading this book, but I felt that it could have been so much more.
For me as a reader, several things fell slightly flat. First, the second half of the book,