Review: Sweet and chilling
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 29, 2013
The way this novel unfolds in installments makes for an exciting adventure of delayed gratification. Kucan is a master of this modern equivalent of the serialization tradition popularized by Dickens, James, and Melville. But when the whole book is available, I fully intend to re-read all the chapters back-to-back, just so I can enjoy them again. Chapter Five takes us to the main character's childhood with all of the complicating contradictions of being eleven. Sweet and chilling and interspersed with his present predicament of prisoners' group therapy, the flashbacks show us that beyond the good guy/bad guy, black-and-white world of childhood lie the many grey and disillusioning demons of the grown-up world. Welcome to adulthood, Isaac.