Book Cover This is a different form than my normal reviews. I usually don't go back to old books to add to my reviews, but this is a touch-stone. It's a book that a LOT of folks have read, and I hope it might help someone who also read this book tune in on where I'm coming from. I read this book several years ago, and though I flipped through it to refresh my mind for this entry, I didn't just read it again in full....
Book cover Seems an appropriate way to start off the first book review of 2019 with a book that came out in 2009. On top of that, it's a book that I really, really enjoyed reading. This book follows the protagonist, Henry Lee both as a 13 year old in 1943, and an adult in 1986. If you have been reading my reviews for a while, you'll note that I get picky when time starts jumping around, and I'm really happy to say that this book gets this simple detail absolutely right: Every chapter title includes the year....
Book cover I will start by noting that this book started slow for me. It took me over two weeks to read the prologue up through the fourth chapter. Once I passed that, I read the next 80% of the book in two days finishing on a third. Every character in this book is a Native American either from or converging on Oakland California. There is a lot of exploration, especially among the young characters, of what it means to be Native in the city....
Book cover Even though I'm reviewing an Advance copy, this story is surprisingly nonlinear, and I doubt that will change, though - really - it could. The book starts, like a 1970s movie, listing the cast of characters in the approximate order in which the characters appear. It's a story about two people, writing screenplays that are not exactly about the same thing, but are derived from a shared starting point and past....