PositiveWBURIn chronicling the specificity of parental love, Our Missing Hearts pierces and reanimates our weary ones.
Anne Enright
RaveThe Boston GlobeVeronica's mental journey back, not just to her own childhood but also to her grandparents' imagined courtship, is her attempt to delineate causes from consequences and individual nature from family environment. And while the details, the facts, are shifty and evasive, the emotion fueling Veronica's dive off the deep end is unambiguous and high-test … This novel is not just the latest entry in the once-popular recovered-memory-of-abuse genre; in fact, the traumatic events are the least of the story. The Gathering is a witty, scatological, and moving splendor of a novel. Enright's language is percussive one moment, liquid the next, and always in the service of Veronica as we accompany her in her hobbled, painful steps toward self-reinvention.
Haruki Murakami
RaveThe Boston GlobeIn some respects this book is a primer on existentialism, but in Murakami's capable hands, weighty philosophical matters are unpretentiously filtered down to a simple, poignant question posed by a boy who was abandoned by his mother, a man-child without moorings, who wonders, ‘All I know is that I'm totally alone . . . Is this what it means to be free?’ … Murakami's power to imagine is breathtaking and the empathy infusing Kafka on the Shore makes it a responsible book, one that is adult, wise, and forgiving.
