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"A random bolt from a DC-8 falls from the sky, killing a child and throwing the faith of a young Jesuit into crisis. A boy's mother dies on his fifth birthday, sparking a lifetime of repressed anger that he unleashes once a year in reckless duels with the Fate, God, or Power who let the coincidence happen. A young woman on a run in Seattle experiences a shooting star moment that pierces her with a love that will eventually help heal the Jesuit, the angry young man, and innumerable others. The journeys of this unintentional menagerie carry them to the healing lands of Montana and a newly founded community--where nothing tastes better than Maker's Mark mixed with glacier ice, and nothing seems less likely than the soul-filling delight a troupe of spiritual refugees, urban sophisticates, road-weary musicians, and local cowboys begin to find in each other's company"--… (more)
User reviews
In the end I was deeply disappointed.
By the second two hundred page, it was
The last 250 pages were nearly unreadable, often just a string of random events and vignettes that added little new, and and kept hitting many of the same notes so hard it it was descending into self-parody. By this point I ceased to care about any of the characters and often resorted to skimming.
Some of his endnotes were entertaining: One in which he claimed to have pared the original manuscript down radically to leave only the most necessary and most meaningful passages (?1?!) The other in which he congratulated himself on doing a better job of "men writing women." Though I loved his previous books, his female characters were not his strong point. And frankly all of his characters strain belief in this book, but the women, especially Risi, are each different flavors of manic pixie dream girls.
This could have been a pretty darn good 350 page book.