Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2014 March 26 • Wednesday

Here's a great new book. It might not sound great, though. It's hard to describe the concept without making it sound goofy.

It's a novel that centers on a family over a period of decades. Each chapter tells a story about one member of the family. The chapters are titled after the name of the character who is the focus.

Here's the part that might sound goofy. Each of these characters, in his or her chapter, basically gets a superpower. Make yourself invisible, learn to fly, read minds, whatever. One ability per character.

One of the brilliant things about the novel is how restrained, understated and realistic it is. The power is definitely real but so subtly used and described that there's an air of ambiguity around it.

Best of all, the book leads to a pretty solid conclusion. It ends with Alek, the most mysterious character. When we first meet him he's a little kid. We're told that "His Superman underpants stuck out from his jeans". This is significant as is, perhaps, that his name is spelled with the same letters as Kal-El. (There's an extra l so it's not an anagram.)

Great book! The first line is "At last, they were arriving in the land of normalcy: streetlamps, parked cars, and hedges".