Genre: Book
Grade: B+
Notable People: Anthony Doerr
Title: “About Grace”
Review: Hard to believe……500th review over the last eight years or so…. must need something else to do……This is a very complicated first novel from the author of “All the Light We Cannot See”, which I reviewed here and loved. Doerr is meticulous in his writing and at times a bit hard to keep up with. This is a sweeping story of a tortured hydrologist and his quest for some form of truth and meaning…. lots and lots of minutia about all things water in the book, most of it symbolic. The story takes place over 30 or so years moving from Anchorage to Cleveland to St. Vincent’s in the Caribbean, as the protagonist tries to find his wife and daughter, who he abandoned in in 1979 during a flood in Cleveland that he had dreamed would occur (a frequent event in the book). He has no idea if his daughter had died in the flood and escapes to the Caribbean, living a minimalist existence and obsessing over the causal link between his dreams and people’s horrific misfortunes- possibly even his daughter’s death. I was inclined to give up on this book multiple times, but it kept me just enough hooked to carry on, and was glad I did. This is a book that takes time to read and absorb, but is ultimately quite moving.