Edgar & Lucy by Victor Lodato
The gorgeous cover originally called me to this advanced reading copy. White-on-white embossed flora, striking black and red font. Beautiful! But I was not at all prepared for a how the pages inside would worm their way into very soul.
It has been some time since I've been utterly startled by a story. I had a bit of a reading rut after November's election. I would pick up a book but nothing felt... right. My usual standby, dystopian fiction, now hit too close to home and made me feel physically ill. I considered rereading an old favorite like the Harry Potter series, but if you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I avoid rereads for the most part. So although I was completely enamored with the cover art, I assumed that this would be yet another book I'd close for good after 12 pages.
However, this story was at once gripping and beautiful. The empathy with which Lodato wrote all of his characters, even the villains, was refreshing and unusual. The world spun out from Edgar Fini as the sun, but the orbiting planets of the people in his life were the truly interesting aspects of his story.
Synopsis:
Edgar and Lucy is a page-turning literary masterpiece―a stunning examination of family love and betrayal.
Eight-year-old Edgar Fini remembers nothing of the accident people still whisper about. He only knows that his father is gone, his mother has a limp, and his grandmother believes in ghosts. When Edgar meets a man with his own tragic story, the boy begins a journey into a secret wilderness where nothing is clear―not even the line between the living and the dead. In order to save her son, Lucy has no choice but to confront the demons of her past.
Profound, shocking, and beautiful, Edgar and Lucy is a thrilling adventure and the unlikeliest of love stories.