Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill -- hcChapel Hill, NC -- ©2006 -- 300pp
ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-443-1
Autographed by Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott
Meeting at a wedding and nearly completing a sexual encounter in a coat-check room, a man and a woman decide to correspond by mail and confess their loves and sexual past to each other before they make love.
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I'm a tremendous fan of Almond's writing and really looked forward to this new book ... bumping it up my reading list just so I could devour it, but I found it sadly lacking. It is the fault, I believe, of the format of this book.
A series of letters detailing one biased perspective of a lost love and/or sexual encounter, is hard to build excitement and climactic moments.
In the beginning, I felt that it was nothing more than some short stories that were loosely converted for the book, and by the end, I felt that there was nothing new in any of them, and quite frankly, I didn't care if these two people ever got together. (And if you don't care about your "heroes" then what's the point of reading about them?)
This could slip Steve Almond's popularity back a notch a two and he's really going to have to come up with some great short works to over-come this.
Go read My Life in Heavy Metal instead.
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