It is extremely quirky and incredibly touching.
I LOVED the relationship between Oskar, the 8 year old boy narrator and his dad. Oskar is a strange child and he has the most perfect dad. Oskar's grandparents, on the other hand, are wickedly dysfunctional. If you enjoy books where no one is normal, you'll appreciate this one.
Some of my fav quotes:
- “Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.” [12]
- “I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.” [88]
- “Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are.” [99]
- “Songs are as sad as the listener.” [108]
- “I like to see people reunited, maybe that’s a silly thing, but what can I say, I like to see people run into each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can’t tell fast enough, the ears that aren’t big enough, the eyes that can’t take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone…” [109]
- “So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!” [153]
- “You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.” [180]
- “Feeling pain is still better than not feeling, isn’t it?” [245]
- "Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living"
- "Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future."
- "I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live."
- "I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love."
- "She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet."
- "In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York is in heavy boots."
- "I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want."
- "I never confused what I had with what I was."
- "I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn't recognize it. It's not that I didn't trust him, becuase I did. It's that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don't know how I could have tried harder."
- "She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes"
- "Mom told me, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be Grandma, don’t you think?” I told her, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone"
Anyway, I enjoyed the book, but it clearly isn't for everyone.
Three things I'm thankful for:
1. Book talk with my friends.
2. Book talk with my boy. (Drew just read a book he wants me to read. RIGHT NOW. Stop blogging.)
3. Facebook update from Clint. He was in Palestine yesterday and is alive today.
Shalom,
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