Wow… okay, you’ve heard me be hard on a couple of books now prepare to hear me GUSH!
I’ll start with the amazing first line: “Accidents ambush the unsuspecting, often violently, like love.” This line took my breath away. By the time I was 3 or 4 chapters in I was describing this book to my friends as divine… a gift from the heavens delivered through the talented author Andrew Davidson. And I don’t mean that to take anything away from Davidson. He totally showed up and brought an amazing story to life.
Davidson’s language is elegantly simple and beautifully crafted. For me, when writing is this skilled and taut all the actual work of reading (holding the book, following the words, turning the pages) melts away and I am simply one with the story. That’s how I felt reading this book. This is quite an undertaking for a debut novelist and I felt sure that his story would stumble at some point. But it never did.
Davidson brought this glorious, historic, epic deeply romantic story of love that knows no bounds all the way home! This book will stay with me for a very long time. I feel changed by it. And… I am chagrined to say that had I read this book before writing my own, I might never have made the attempt. That would have been a sorry loss (for me at least). But what I have done is resolve to not only be a better person, but a better writer as a result of this amazing story.
Needless to say, I highly recommend this book.
Oh, after I finished reading the book I did some googling about it and there are some interesting factoids about where some of the ideas and stories came from (the classic structure is a story-within-a-story) . There are 33 chapters and the author turned the first letter of the first word in every chapter into an anagram as well as the last word in every chapter.
