... vital, arresting ... Griner is too skilled a realist to allow The Book of Otto and Liam to become a simple revenge story. There are indeed moments of exhilarating rectification, but these moments are so deeply grounded in the novel’s moral texture that each victory is balanced by an awareness of what’s forfeited ... The Book of Otto and Liam is a serious and urgent book, with the power to appall, outrage, thrill and make a reader mourn; it is also a very funny book ... Trauma narratives all too often collapse into a kind of torture porn, entertainments akin to the disaster tourism that repulsed the officer at the novel’s opening. But Griner gives us a story that is at once bursting with life and hollowed out by death, that celebrates our humanity and knows all our dirty secrets. The Book of Otto and Liam is a portrait of us in our present moment, battered by a reckless and deceitful government, battling our own inurement to daily horrors, and doing our best to get on with the business of living.
Through short, episodic chapters interspersed with sketches, memories, letters, and a running count of school shootings and deaths, Griner creates an entirely original portrait of grief, loss, and finding a new way forward in the aftermath of an all-too-familiar tragedy.
In his heartwrenching novel The Book of Otto and Liam, Paul Griner traces the hard-fought healing of a school shooting victim’s father ... The novel’s colorful scenes are as intricate and painstaking as the sketches that Otto makes for his graphic marketing business ... The Book of Otto and Liam is a biting literary novel that protects a fragile truth with its endearing story of fatherly love.
Until an unfortunately rushed ending, Griner’s novel is a powerful excavation into the darkest recesses of grief. Parents of young children, beware: Liam is such a believable child that identifying with his parents’ stark anguish becomes unavoidable—and so unbearable that it’s hard to imagine how the author could bring himself to keep writing. Unabashedly polemical, angry, and heartbreaking.
