Its ability to maintain its sense of humor through its devastating, sometimes gruesome story: I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other’s hands.Ĥ. Think of the first time you slept with someone, or the first time you fell in love: that blinding explosion that left you crackling to the fingertips with electricity, initiated and transformed. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver. The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom.
The relationship between Rob and his partner, Cassie:
We betray her routinely, spending hours and days stupor-deep in lies, and then turn back to her holding out the lover’s ultimate Mobius strip: But I only did it because I love you so much.ģ. The truth is the most desirable woman in the world and we are the most jealous lovers, reflexively denying anyone else the slightest glimpse of her. This is none of Ireland’s subtle seasons mixed for a connoisseur’s palette, watercolor nuances within a pinch-sized range of cloud and soft rain this is summer full-throated and extravagant in a hot pure silkscreen blue. Picture a summer stolen whole from some coming-of-age film set in small-town 1950s. And though the mysteries are well-spun yarns, it’s the characters that get to me in this novel, especially how beautifully drawn Rob and his partner Cassie are. Twenty years later, Rob Ryan, the found boy, is a detective, investigating the murder of another child in those same woods. Hours later, only one little boy is found, with blood on his shoes and slashes on his back and no memory of the previous hours.
The premise is chilling and engrossing: In 1984, three children disappear into the woods outside a suburb of Dublin. This book is perfect: the characters, the beautiful sentences, the plot, the themes. The fact that this book has anything fewer than five stars on Goodreads and Amazon is one of the main reasons I tend to disregard reviews from people whose tastes I don’t know when deciding what to read next. (The first best is Tana French’s follow-up novel, the Likeness– I’ll get around putting my love for that beautiful novel into words at some point I review that here). This is the second best book I’ve ever read. THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS AFTER THE JUMP
0 kommentar(er)
