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Fiction. Literature. HTML: A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year Winner of the James Michener/Copernicus Society Fellowship Prize Lambda Literary Foundation Editor's Choice Award "[Chee] says volumes with just a few incendiary words." �??New York Times "Arresting . . . profound and poetic . . . Chee's voice is worth listening to." �??San Francisco Chronicle "Alexander Chee gets my vote for the best new novelist I've read in some time. Edinburgh is moody, dramatic�??and pure." �??Edmund White Twelve-year-old Fee is a shy Korean American boy and a newly named section leader of the first sopranos in his local boys' choir. But when Fee learns how the director treats his section leaders, he is so ashamed he says nothing of the abuse, not even when Peter, his best friend, is in line to be next. When the director is arrested, Fee tries to forgive himself for his silence. But when Peter takes his own life, Fee blames only himself. In the years that follow he slowly builds a new life, teaching near his hometown. There he meets a young student who is the picture of Peter and is forced to confront the past he believed was gone. Told with "the force of a dream and the heft of a life,"* Edinburgh marked Chee "as a major talent whose career will bear watching" (Publishers Weekly). "A coming-of-age tale in the grand Romantic tradition, where passions run high, Cupid stalks Psyche, and love shares the dance floor with death . . . A lovely, nuanced, never predictable portrait of a creative soul in the throes of becoming." �??Washington Po… (more)
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For Alexander Chee has taken a subject that is ugly and perverse and has sculpted it into something moving and somehow, beautiful.
(Autocorrect keeps changing my “moving” into “loving” but really, loving is an equally suitable word for this book.)
A young boy joins a boys’ choir. Aphias or Fee is 12 and Korean-Scottish. He may look a bit different from the other boys but like them, he is sexually abused by the choir director.
Edinburgh is the story of how he overcomes this childhood trauma and the loss of those he loves.
It is no easy read but it is haunting and spectacular, even more so when I realized this was his debut novel. It may seem like a weird juxtaposition but this book was both beautiful and brutal.
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