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Loading... Await Your Replyby Dan Chaon
Seriously satisfying. I listened to this on audio, and was a total sucker until the very last line. ( )Seriously satisfying. I listened to this on audio, and was a total sucker until the very last line. It was well written, but after I finished I was still waiting for it to start... I love the way the three stories came together and enjoyed the surprises along the way. Great novel. I look forward to reading more of his books. This novel tells three stories in alternating chapters, each of which begins with a car ride: A young man, bleeding badly, is being rushed to a hospital through the rural woods of Michigan. A nineteen-year-old girl, having just recently graduated high school, is running off to Nebraska with her former high school history teacher. And another man is driving through Canada in search of his long-missing twin brother, who might or might be not schizophrenic. At first, none of these stories appear to have much of anything to do with each other, but it becomes more and more apparent as the novel goes on that they are intimately tied together... I enjoyed this a lot. It's got a corker of an opening, and it just keeps going from there, with the intriguing hints of connection between these three very different stories making for a puzzle whose answers creep up on you gradually in an interesting and satisfying way. It's also very well-written, with vivid characters and pages that just seem to fly by. If it weren't for annoying little things like sleep and work, I think I could easily have finished this in one sitting.
It’s hard to talk about Await Your Reply at length without giving too much away. In fact, the less you know about the novel going in, the better. Chaon does a great job of shifting the novel’s chronology around to trickle the plotlines out as he sees fit. It’s a gimmick that could have been hackneyed, but Chaon makes it work here. He seems more interested in filling in the lives of his characters than constructing some complex whodunit — and the result is a more nuanced, creepy affair than sensory jarring thriller. [A] dark, deliciously disturbing literary thriller... Await Your Reply is a story that unfolds with chilling precision. You'll be spellbound from start to finish. You need to step into this work of psychological suspense completely unprepared for what lurks in here. If somebody starts telling you what they liked best, put your fingers in your ears and sing: "La, la, la, la!" But you can trust me -- which is just what all the manipulative creeps in this novel say. Chaon is a dark, provocative writer, and “Await Your Reply” is a dark, provocative book; in bringing its three strands together, Chaon has fashioned a braid out of barbed wire.
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While Miles pursues elusive letters and clues in a perpetual search for his missing twin, Ryan struggles with the discovery that he is adopted, and Lucy finds her daring escape from her hometown posing unexpectedly dangerous consequences.
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