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I read this because in one of Nick Hornby's Believer columns he mentioned this was supposed to be the best YA book of all time. I don't know where he got this information, maybe from the ALA or some other three letter group. He gave it a glowing review so I thought I'd read it.

My first thought after reading it was that if it had been an adult novel I would have loved it. As a novel it felt more like a very nice sketch of an interesting and magical story than what I would like from a finished book. Not that there seemed to be anything necessarily missing from the book, it just didn't seem fully flushed out, like there was more he could have done with the book to given it more depth and expanded some of the themes in even more interesting ways. Of course doing so would have made this probably not a YA novel, but rather moved him into the magical-realism worlds of someone like Jonathan Carroll or Nicholas Christopher. But that said I found this really enjoyable, but in a teasing way that made me want more of something that there was no more to have.

The funny thing I found in this book was the author interview at the end. The author is asked about his influences, and he is led in the question to a magical realism answer which he admits to having and cites Marquez, someone whom I have never read, but maybe one day will. But then he answers that his other big influence is Raymond Carver. I find this to be really funny (not that you can't see the Carver in the book, the minimalism of Carver is defintely present in the streamlined no nonsense prose contained within) because I'm imagining some 13 year old who loving this book goes to read the people the author says are good and goes to pick up Carver. This is something I would have done at 13, and still do to this day, I'm a sucker for going after influences of authors I love and expanding the books I will one day need to read in this way. I would love to see the reaction of a 13 year old reading story after story of middle aged losers with dead end jobs getting drunk, chain-smoking and living in the dismal shit of adulthood. What would a young teen make of this? Would it scar them for life? Would they instantly suffer some existential crisis? How would a youngster deal with the harsh reality of Carver's characters? So yeah I found that funny, in an absurd-ish sort of way, but that really has nothing to do with the book which was pretty damned good.