book review
Title: The Hour I First Believed
Author: Wally Lamb
# of Pages: 768
Summary (from amazon.com): In his new novel, The Hour I First Believed, Lamb travels well beyond his earlier work and embodies in his fiction myth, psychology, family history stretching back many generations, and the questions of faith that lie at the heart of everyday life. The result is an extraordinary tour de force, at once a meditation on the human condition and an unflinching yet compassionate evocation of character.
When forty-seven-year-old high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his younger wife, Maureen, a school nurse, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, Caelum returns home to Three Rivers, Connecticut, to be with his aunt who has just had a stroke. But Maureen finds herself in the school library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed, as two vengeful students go on a carefully premeditated, murderous rampage. Miraculously she survives, but at a cost: she is unable to recover from the trauma. Caelum and Maureen flee Colorado and return to an illusion of safety at the Quirk family farm in Three Rivers. But the effects of chaos are not so easily put right, and further tragedy ensues.
While Maureen fights to regain her sanity, Caelum discovers a cache of old diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings in an upstairs bedroom of his family's house. The colorful and intriguing story they recount spans five generations of Quirk family ancestors, from the Civil War era to Caelum's own troubled childhood. Piece by piece, Caelum reconstructs the lives of the women and men whose legacy he bears. Unimaginable secrets emerge; long-buried fear, anger, guilt, and grief rise to the surface.
As Caelum grapples with unexpected and confounding revelations from the past, he also struggles to fashion a future out of the ashes of tragedy. His personal quest for meaning and faith becomes a mythic journey that is at the same time quintessentially contemporary-and American.
Opinion: I was completely enthralled by the book - it was engaging, relevant, and so so interesting. I love Lamb's context - taking the nonfiction events of Columbine and the start of the Iraq war following 9/11 and weaving his own story within and around it. Couple that with his wordsmithing, his timeline, and how multi-dimensional the character of Caelum is, I flew through all 700+ pages of this book without looking back. I think, for me, the best part about reading this book was the clear definition of Caelum as a character from the very beginning and the very end - his transformation is well defined and all of that is because of Lamb's storytelling.
Now Reading: Inferno by Dan Brown
x-posted to books