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BOOKS I READ: About Grace by Anthony Doerr (2004). David Winkler, an Anchorage weatherman enamored with the hydrologic cycle, is troubled by his dreams, premonitions, really, that lead to hazardous sleepwalking incidents, and even more dangerous consequences afterward. He falls in love with Sandy, a married woman he first encounters in a dream. They run away from Alaska, moving to Cleveland. There they have a child, but his actions during a life-threatening flood, raises questions about his sanity. He decides it’s better to disconnect. He flees, ending up in the Caribbean, where he is taken in by a Chilean family running away from turmoil in their own country. For a quarter century the whereabouts of Sandy and his daughter Grace are a mystery. He heads back to the States to search for them once he can no longer handle not knowing what happened to them.
About Grace is Doerr’s first novel, released ten years before his Pulitzer Prize winning book, All the Light We Cannot See. There are numerous paragraphs that require a second reading, to glean the magic off the pages. One example is the description of the thirteen-year-old Winkler’s memory of the day his mother died in his apartment in building that used to be a furrier’s storehouse. It is beautifully rendered, how the boy witnesses the walls leaching ghosts of gentle animals who come to escort his mother’s soul away (pg. 304).
The sequencing of the books one reads can lead to interesting threads. In my case, it’s the centrality of the geometry of water crystals in two recent books: Cat’s Cradle, with its wicked water crystal, ice-nine, and this book, with Winkler enthralled by the geometric beauty of snowflakes, which he photographs with a microscope.
See my Bookshop.org stand, supporting local bookstores, and my reading log. The previous book in the log is below:
