Scan barcode
reasie's review against another edition
2.0
Despite those tasty bits of local color, ("stickers depicting a cartoon buzzard" and "a local candy store known for its chocolate-dipped strawberries" are all-too vivid descriptions if you happen to be from Cleveland) this was ultimately a very disappointing book about one extremely self-involved man's self-involved journey to justify his own self-involvement.
Ostensibly it starts out good, he's visiting the grave of a high school friend who was found dead in his car on a Cleveland street corner of a "self-administered drug overdose" according to the coroner's report. He has just found the grave with the help of one Bobby, who is enigmatic and well-described and then completely dropped. You are lead to believe he will be on a quest to learn about his dead buddy, that we'll learn about how he found said Bobby and connected him to the dead buddy, but our narrator cannot even once let go of his own angst at not feeling happy in his adult, white-collar life and vaguely guilty about his blue-collar childhood.
Grow the hell up, dude. At the end there's a religious epiphany that makes the whole thing make more sense - of course, it's a book about his journey from unbelief to belief, that's why all the stupid crap about religion and so-and-so saying such-and-such lame-ass story that's sorta not very miraculous. I kinda wanted something that was actually about something, though. The epiphany was cheap. If he wanted to tell about it, he should have shown us more of what led him there.
Ostensibly it starts out good, he's visiting the grave of a high school friend who was found dead in his car on a Cleveland street corner of a "self-administered drug overdose" according to the coroner's report. He has just found the grave with the help of one Bobby, who is enigmatic and well-described and then completely dropped. You are lead to believe he will be on a quest to learn about his dead buddy, that we'll learn about how he found said Bobby and connected him to the dead buddy, but our narrator cannot even once let go of his own angst at not feeling happy in his adult, white-collar life and vaguely guilty about his blue-collar childhood.
Grow the hell up, dude. At the end there's a religious epiphany that makes the whole thing make more sense - of course, it's a book about his journey from unbelief to belief, that's why all the stupid crap about religion and so-and-so saying such-and-such lame-ass story that's sorta not very miraculous. I kinda wanted something that was actually about something, though. The epiphany was cheap. If he wanted to tell about it, he should have shown us more of what led him there.
More...