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michaelhartford

michaelhartford

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Shelter Half
Carol Bly
The Bee-Loud Glade
Steve Himmer

The Great Perhaps: A Novel

The Great Perhaps - Joe Meno Joe Meno’s The Great Perhaps is an inventive, startling novel that is equally comic and affecting. It tells the story of Jonathan Casper’s family in dissolution: his daughters Thisbe and Amelia in their struggles with adolescent sex and politics and ambition; his wife Madeline equally troubled by her research into the social behavior of pigeons and her marriage to a neurotic and unhappy man; his father Henry’s haunting by his memories of a World War II interment camp and his work designing war planes; and Jonathan’s own deep unhappiness with life and the thwarting of his dream of unlocking the secrets of evolution through the study of prehistoric giant squids. Meno weaves together squids, clouds, pigeons, airplanes, and radio dramas in subtle and fascinating ways; though his characters are realistic and squarely set in their middle-class Chicago neighborhood, he leaves open the door to the unknowable and the impossible.Full review