if you like Drop City (TC Boyle)

good book discussion ( )

The premise of the story seems hardly credible: Anna Xenos (known throughout the novel as Dial) is a professor, newly appointed to a position at Vassar, but one day her past reaches out to snag her when she receives a request for help in taking a seven year old boy (Che), the son of known underground radicals (this is the era of the Vietnam war), from his grandmother and bringing the child to his mother. She could say no, but she doesn’t and so starts an adventure that turns her life upside down, physically when she ends up on the run as a kidnapper in the back-of-beyond in the Australian outback in a sort of commune of people the world has passed by , and emotionally when she finally finds, without even realizing that it is happening, an anchor in her life that is her love for Che.

Che has grown up quite secluded, with his very wealthy grandmother, whom he loves, and in constant anticipation of seeing and being with his mother and father whom he does not even remember, having been separated from them at an early age. The word precocious barely does justice to Che, but beneath his intelligence and his maturity, he is a seven year old boy desperate for the love of his mother, and one that must undergo a further, wrenching metamorphosis when he discovers that his mother is dead, his father doesn’t care, and Dial is not, as he has thought all along, his mother.

This is a novel about love and how it can grow unbeknownst until its loss threatens and then the tentacles that have grown into the heart become apparent; it is about finding peace within oneself and with another; it is a fine novel with well-drawn characters working out their lives amidst the emotional struggles that we all face and all deal with in our own ways.

This beautifully written book tells a compelling and unique story, allowing readers to experience political rebellion through the eyes of a precocious child. The characters are believable, and the writing vividly captures a turbulent era. ( )