Reading Recommendation: The Love We Share Without Knowing, by Christopher Barzak

April 4th 2010 at 8:32 pm

I just finished this book as my reward for a long (and pleasant) convention and getting 5K or more words done as well.  After I read the last page, I realized I had been putting it off because I didn’t wanted to get to the end.  It’s so magical and sweet and faintly sad I loved being inside it.   It was deeply satisfying.  Not in the way that I usually enjoy books.  It has no real visible plot, no single protagonist.  It is elegantly structured, and beautifully written, and tender.  I might describe it as a prose version of one of those poems you read for pure pleasure and then suddenly realize was actually a sestina, and then you take a deep breath and appreciate the art of it.

If you like good literary fiction, I think you will like this one.  It does have speculative and magical elements, although the center of this stage is the human sense of self.

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