A Child Across the Sky by Jonathan Carroll
My rating: 5/5 cats
go ahead and judge jonathan carroll’s books by their covers; lord knows i always have:
and so has spectrum:
the above edition has selected three of his covers in their “best of the year,” during a particularly fruitful period of reissues:
the covers are what first made me want to read him, and what still makes me collect him in every language i can get. but it’s not just surface; with my jonathan carroll, his books deliver on the spooky-fun promise of the covers. he does tend to tackle the same themes over and again, but always in a way that is refreshingly different from most other people’s coverage of the same ideas. if kjaerstad is focused upon what is the meaning of a life and what are the parts which comprise that life, carroll’s preoccupation is all with the other end of the timeline: what does death have in store? and he is certainly not the first author to come up with an idea of the soul or ghosts or afterlife, but he is the one having the most fun doing it.
child across the sky is my favorite of his novels, and the most successful, overall. (sometimes i have some issues with the way he chooses to wrap his stories up, but this one is pretty strong)
if you like these things, you should like jonathan carroll: dogs, death, film, childhood actions and their repercussions, cause/effect/ justice, and more dogs. that is jonathan carroll, in a nutshell. it’s reductive, but i don’t want to spoil anyone’s pleasure in discovering him for themselves. he has this effect upon people, when someone reads one of his books, even one of his weaker ones—they always want more. i have rotated my collection several times over to so many different people with completely different tastes…he has this mass appeal because he is really fun without being frivolous.
dunno—go read him and you tell me what you think.
and if you are traveling somewhere where foreign languages are spoken, get me some new ones, preferably italian, farsi, or polish…
thanks!
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