Sean Ferrell

This book is why I read outside my literary fiction comfort zones. A time-traveling, dystopian murder mystery with a main cast of one, this book basically blew my mind. I am sitting here, wondering about it all, unable to read anything else.
At first, the premise sounded way too good to be true; no one has ever (to my knowledge) written a novel like this before. When things started getting hairy- and there is no other word I would pick to describe the mess the narrator found himself, in his show more own life- it began to really bother the O.c.d. In me.... Such a convoluted, confusing, hairy mess!! And then the running..... So... Much... Running. I was exhausted just reading about it. But I digress:

Each year our narrator (who has no name) celebrates his birthday at a party in an abandoned hotel in a future New York where the only guests are past and future versions of himself. The book starts with his 39th birthday party, the year that a dead version of himself and a beautiful woman in a red dress appear at the party for the first time. What has been a fairly consistent experience for the past years, is suddenly untethered from the sequence of events he thought he knew. How are there versions of himself at the party older than the dead one? (PARADOX!!!). Where did this woman come from, and why has she never been here before? How do the younger versions of himself keep doing things he has never done before? There is a tear in the fabric of his own time, and only he can repair it. And then the narrator has to go back in time 6 months, to stop the unnecessary death of someone he loves a great deal (and this is where it gets really GOOD!!)
I know, it sounds like a terrible sci-fi movie. And I see how the book may seem like an unnecessarily complicated mind game. But the ways it asked me to reflect on being, identity, self-hood, reliance and interdependence made it more than simply a puzzle to be solved. I can not stop thinking about the ways these versions of self fit together and what it means for those of us in the real world to have past and future versions of ourselves that we are responsible for and to. Combined with how well Ferrell described the settings and the result is a book that is cinematic, in the best possible way.

I may need a parrot tattoo, now.....

Must read!!! show less

"Ruthie has a problem at school," the narrator of The Snurtch tells us, and it isn't her fellow students, her classroom, or her academic subjects. No, her problem is the titular Snurtch. A nasty individual, one who isn't good at taking instruction, but who excels at making itself unpleasant to her classmates, the Snurtch follows Ruthie wherever she goes, often getting her into trouble in class and making her unpopular on the playground. When Ruthie shares a picture of the Snurtch in class, show more the response of her classmates, together with the knowledge that they too are troubled by such creatures, reconciles her to her school life...

The second collaboration from author Sean Ferrell and illustrator Charles Santoso, following upon I Don't Like Koala, this entertaining picture-book addresses an all-too-common problem in young children - the inability to control feelings of anger, aggression, and spite - in an innovative and creative fashion. Here these feelings are externalized, made into a creature known as the Snurtch, allowing young readers to visualize the problem, and to see how bad behavior is as much a problem for the wrongdoer, as for those who must deal with her. I liked the way that Santoso depicted the Snurtches here, showing them in vibrant but semi-transparent color, as this emphasizes their almost ghost-like, haunting quality. I would recommend The Snurtch to anyone looking for children's stories that address negative emotions, and how to deal with them. show less

Good science fiction does two things well: first, it blows your mind. And second, it's less about the science than it is about the story, about the characters, and the conflict. In other words, it's good literature that just happens to have a scientific element...even if loosely.

Sean Ferrell's [b:Man in the Empty Suit|13531802|Man in the Empty Suit|Sean Ferrell|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1340467584s/13531802.jpg|19093477] accomplishes both of these and accomplishes them well. The plot show more starts no earlier than necessary, wastes no time with excess details (including the main character's name), and plows on through to an ending which both answers, and opens, questions in the same breath.

As a work of science fiction, [b:Man in the Empty Suit|13531802|Man in the Empty Suit|Sean Ferrell|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1340467584s/13531802.jpg|19093477] takes the route of ignoring how time travel works and focuses instead on the consequences of it. The result is a character study that is almost as interesting as the problem the character encounters: how does he solve his own death with the help of no more than clues and hints by a bunch of paranoid versions of his future self?

It's intriguing, and well executed, to boot. I have two reasons I don't like the book more, the first character related and the second more due to pacing. First, I found it difficult to sympathize with the protagonist, someone I can't quite call selfish, but neither is he admirable.

The character of the time traveler aside, the book's pacing lulls in the middle, and picks up again to a breakneck pace at the end, more than compensating for the lull. In retrospect, the slower pacing in the middle makes sense, but as I read I felt like it dragged.

Still, it's worth the read. A thank you and a hat tip to Amanda Nelson, over at Dead White Guys, who says about [b:Man in the Empty Suit|13531802|Man in the Empty Suit|Sean Ferrell|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1340467584s/13531802.jpg|19093477] to "Buy, you fools!" show less

I really enjoyed this sci-fi whodunit. I don't claim to have read an exhaustive list of time travel novels, but this must be one of the best ones. At it's best moments, the sci-fi disappeared into the background and this was a story of self reflection and self discovery. At it's lowest, it felt like a writing exercise- the search for a story within a trope.