#about grace

Tagged by: @diedindulvey (Thank you!)

About Grace by Anthony Doerr is a book about a man who sometimes dreams the future, and when he is plagued by a nightmare of his baby daughter drowning in his hands, flees all together in the hopes of cutting off the possibility of it becoming reality. The novel takes us through the story of his anxiety and obsession, from the shores of St Vincent to the ice and cutting cold of Alaska.

This is Doerr's first novel, and not quite carved down yet. You can tell that it blossomed from Doerr's short stories, but grew further, but at times the parts are disconnected. It should have been a much shorter novel, because for long lengths, the reader is just subjected to an infinite anxiety, and while Doerr's writing is superb as it will always be, the space between excellent chunks of book could have been shorter.

Still, it was worth finishing. From descriptions of the harsh cold and his patient study of snowflakes to his uncle-like relationship to budding scientist Naaliyah, to Winkler's desperate inner need to know and simultaneous panic about whether his daughter Grace survived and is alive somewhere, the novel has a good emotional core with an interesting surrealist bent. You see glimmers of the writer who will give us his later awe-inspiring novels in this one.