104 Book Round Up #2

So the second round comes through with now only 100 to go. So here are the reviews for Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and Richard Price's The Wanderers.


Foer's first book, Everything Is Illuminated was a tough read but a rewarding one. Broken English dominated its pages and a broken structure was difficult to get into. However his second is a far more standard work, or at least closer to standard than its predecessor. This is the alternately heartwarming and heartbreaking story of a young man whose father dies in 9/11 leaving behind a key that holds within it a mystery. The story is written from several different perspectives but its that of 9 year old Oskar and his attempts to make sense of this world and the mystery the key leads him into. Its a gorgeous, emotive and involving read that will leave you with a melancholic smile on your face at its close.





The Wanderers is quite a different prospect, a series of vignettes set in early-60s Brooklyn following the eponymous street gang through their formative years of drinking, having sex and growing up the hard way. Its certainly of its time and the first few chapters are tough going with the racist language and graphic sexual description. But once its feet are found, this becomes a very powerful story of lost youth amongst the working classes of a poor neighbourhood. Abusive husbands and fathers, delinquent teens and hustling gangsters all feature and all end up either with a modicum of humanity or even a factor of likeability. Price paints characters with a fine brush, fleshing out believable kids making some of the situations they are put in all the more touching or brutal. Its superlative writing but certainly this is only for a niche audience, particularly for anyone who lived it.