There is something disorienting about reading this book — or perhaps good stories help a reader to draw strong parallels — if you are both with and not with someone. If you are separated by a distance, or by an age, or by years without exposure. There is something disorienting about reading this novel when you live walking distance from its locales and feel yourself a bit lost to time and memory and hope. This is the vanity that fiction allows: that every story is yours. You know the feeling is shallow and false and, maybe, inescapable. And then you realize that perhaps the story that matters most in these dreams of place and person is not the one you read, but the one you want yourself to tell. Maybe what is also true is that the stories you are meant to hear find you when they most need telling, the same way you might, by someone else, so casually, be found.
