Review: Very enjoyable in parts - when's the novel coming?
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 12 27, 2012
David Boyne is clearly an author who can write. For all his life's inadequacies and difficulties (leading him to dub himself as a failure at everything he has tried), he clearly has a gift with the pen. He is  articulate and, more importantly, someone who is able to help you think "out-of-the-box" and pull at some of your heart strings.I particularly loved his story "Breakfast with Annie" that touches on a number of tender issues such as growing old, dying alone, and what we have to leave behind when we depart from this world. I particularly loved some of the allegories he uses. When commenting on the lives that come and go, he writes: "it would make me see my own life, along with all the lives around me, like falling snowflakes. The geometric pattern of each, at a glance, appears repetitive. But looking closer, looking deeper, each life is unique unto itself, yet designed in such a way as to making linking with the lives falling around it natural, inevitable."The challenge I found with this book was that it is a collection of essays rather than a whole novel. As such it is peppered with both beautiful thoughts and passages that simply failed to really draw me in. While one essay is quite remarkable, another is short and blunt.If Boyne could expand some of his essays, such as "Breakfast with Annie" to a fuller novel, I would rush out and buy/download his next book almost instantly. There is so much promise here from an author who can clearly write. There is something alluring about reading the hardships of other people, largely because it draws human emotions from us. And this is Boyne's strength. It is his telling of other lives, the lives around him, rather than his own, where I find the greatest potential. Like the snowflakes he describes, the joy is in the linking of himself with the people he meets and describes.I hope Boyne continues to write, and to consider taking on a full length novel. I, for one, would be out there to catch the falling snow.