Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by abroadwell
Haiku by Andrew Vachss
4.0
I wasn't familiar with Vachss before, but I was very pleasantly surprised by this. (And I recommend the audio version from Brilliance Audio for nice voice work.)
This initially seems to be a heist book involving a gang of homeless men in NYC. The narrator is the group's leader -- a Japanese martial arts teacher (Ho) who gave up his dojo after inadvertently causing the death of a favorite student. What is touching is the way in which Ho makes these men into a kind of family, and the patient ways in which he deals with the problems (gambling, alcohol, schizophrenia, PTSD) that have made the men homeless in the first place. The problems that come up as they try to work together to track down a possible treasure turn out to be an effective way to introduce the characters and their backstories.
The initial motivation (heist/treasure) is eventually set aside when the men have to unite to solve a different problem -- one which threatens the sanity of their schizophrenic friend. I thought this was a particularly deft change of course that took the book in a way that I would not have predicted. And more power to it for that!
This initially seems to be a heist book involving a gang of homeless men in NYC. The narrator is the group's leader -- a Japanese martial arts teacher (Ho) who gave up his dojo after inadvertently causing the death of a favorite student. What is touching is the way in which Ho makes these men into a kind of family, and the patient ways in which he deals with the problems (gambling, alcohol, schizophrenia, PTSD) that have made the men homeless in the first place. The problems that come up as they try to work together to track down a possible treasure turn out to be an effective way to introduce the characters and their backstories.
The initial motivation (heist/treasure) is eventually set aside when the men have to unite to solve a different problem -- one which threatens the sanity of their schizophrenic friend. I thought this was a particularly deft change of course that took the book in a way that I would not have predicted. And more power to it for that!