This book has been on my reading list for awhile. First off, let me say that I love the artwork on the cover! It is perfect for this book.
McCann does an amazing job of weaving together several separate stories and I love books that do that! At first, each section seems scattered and disjointed but by the end it has been woven into a seamless story.
The writing is beautiful and poignant without being sentimental or overdone. He shifts voices without any trouble at all, making the myriad of different characters authentic and believable.
The story centers around the amazing (true!) story of a man who walked a tightrope between the World Trade Center towers in 1974. That small snippet of truth is turned into a fictional novel. The characters are all tied somehow to this amazing event and not in the traditional ways one might assume. The author keeps you guessing until the end and I enjoyed every minute along the way.
Ha! I just finished this book last night and was here to post about it!
ReplyDeleteI thought it was a great book. I agree that the stories were seamless. Usually I get totally annoyed when a book shifts points of view etc.
It was so heartbreaking and hard to read but I never wanted to put it down. There were so many parts that I marked that I loved. But, one special one is where he talks about how New York has no monuments, like history didn't happen, it is only the now. And how the tigthrope walker was like a living monument. That event would always be with people of the city.
I liked that the book wasn't blatantly political, but when I was reading about the author in the book, I wasn't surprised to see that he hated Bush and that when Obama got elected he decided to give the end of the book some hope.
I would totally recommend this book to people.
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ReplyDeleteSorry I beat you to it! It's the first book besides Freedom that I've finished in the last 2 months. :) That is really interesting about the author and I agree about the heartbreaking scenes. I couldn't mark mine up though...library copy! Definitely a good read.
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