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Life: An Exploded Diagram (2011)

by Mal Peet(Favorite Author)

3.65 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

076365227X (ISBN13: 9780763652272)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Candlewick Press

review 1: 4.5 stars. There were some small issues with the way the story cuts between imagined historical scenes, the main character's narration from an older self, and the main line. The puzzle elements felt forced at times. But this book manages to be sweeping in scope without feeling like it, and the voice is striking: ironic and tender by turns. It's ultimately about the ways major events on the global stage can affect our everyday lives, in ways as bizarre as our personalities and those of the world's leaders. In manipulating the scale of our arenas and the angle from which we regard our history, this book encompasses everything beautiful and excruciating about being a person in the modern world.
review 2: At first when I started reading the book, I was wondering wh... moreere it was going. Then the story picked up as soon as Clem, one of the protagonists, came into the picture. At a hundred pages longer than necessary, it is still a tour de force because when I finished reading it, my first reaction was to wonder what hit me. Very rarely does one get that feeling reading a book. It's a brilliant book. The running thread is of explosions - World War I, World War II, an impending World War III, 9/11, and connected to these macro-explosions are the personal micro-explosions in the lives of the lead characters. It is also a lesson in History and a meditation on the foolishness of the human race. Read, read, read. Don't skip the first few pages; they form the back story. less

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