Review: A lovely story for Christmas
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 3, 2010
Lovely! I finished this book with a lonely tear running down my face, perfect!James, the narrator, is a hardened man. Of all the things he had in his life, only the love for books has remained. When he meets Sedge, James is a paycheck away from the street. To survive he needs to buy the book for his sleazy client, but first his pride and then his attraction for Sedge get in the way. It's James himself that recognizes that he is not probably a model of integrity, but he acts with his own code of honesty and, even when he does wrong, he means well. What I appreciated more is that he's maybe depressed, but he's never bitter.Sedge is giving. He's also single-minded, outspoken and blunt, and a generous lover. The reasons why he's selling the book are altruistic and speak of a man of great ideals.When these two men meet and collide, what comes out is an unstable relationship that kept me turning the pages to see what good might come from such unpromising premises. We are in James' head all the time, so maybe that's the reason why he always seems so contained and closed and tightly wound. Sedge on the contrary seems always to projects himself to the outside. They couldn't be more different.The opposite backgrounds of the two main characters made them even more endearing and James' humor, a trademark of Josh Lanyon's narrators, made me highlight a few paragraphs. There's a masterly drawn encounter with an ocelot that is revealing of both James' practical disposition and Sedge's helping nature. The ending is full of possibilities.I recommend this book to everyone, because it leaves you with a warm and happy feeling.