RaveBook PageGrabs you from the first page and never lets go ... The book\'s meshing of text and art is so smooth and organic you don\'t even notice it unless you notice how well it\'s done ... Layering her family\'s tale with shades of Proust, Camus and Icarus, Bechdel gives her story depth while avoiding pretentiousness.
Willy Vlautin
PositiveBookPage\"Reading a Willy Vlautin novel feels a lot like sitting in the bar talking with Willy Vlautin. And it feels a lot like listening to the songs he writes with his band, Richmond Fontaine. The author\'s previous two novels, The Motel Life and Northline, shared stories with a couple of Richmond Fontaine songs. So does his newest, Lean on Pete, but in this one Vlautin makes room for even more bad luck to plague his main character. In his books, though, bad luck always comes with good stories ... one of the great things about his writing is that you believe in the good guys just as much as the bad. You believe every bad thing that happens to Charley, but you also believe the whole time that things are going to turn out all right.\
Alice Sebold
RaveBookPageWhen you kill off your narrator in the first 10 pages of a novel and tell readers who the killer is you'd better have one compelling story up your sleeve. Alice Sebold does ... Sebold's triumph is in making Susie's voice so immediately compelling that we don't want to let her go, even after she's dead. We want to know what happens next. So does Susie ... Susie's no wispy, thinly drawn ghost; like nearly every other character in the book, she's a remarkable, complex person who has as much humor and kindness as grief ... Sebold has accomplished is to find her own inventive way of expressing the universal alienation and powerlessness we all feel, trapped in our own small worlds apart from each other.
