Virgil Wander
The first novel in ten years from award-winning, bestselling author Leif Enger, Virgil Wander is a sweeping story of new beginnings against all odds that follows the inhabitants of a hard luck town in their quest to revive its flagging heart. Carried aloft by quotidian pleasures of kite-flying, movies, fishing, baseball, necking in parked cars and falling in love, Virgil Wander is a swift, full journey into the heart and heartache of an often overlooked upper Midwest by an award-winning master storyteller.
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Community Reviews
Loved this sweet story and all the qurky characters. One star off because of a fatal flaw (for me) at the end.
I loved discussing this in my book club, as all the ambiguities gave us so much to discuss. On the one hand, you can take a very realistic view of the events in which case the book leaves much unanswered. But if you take a more magical realism view of the story it seems to me, it's all resolved. There were numerous beautiful lines in the book, especially, for me, regarding the love story aspect.
Full of symbolism and metaphor, this novel also expertly captures life in crumbling rural towns. Virgil and the cast of characters from Greenstone embody and simultaneously defy stereotypic small town folk. We see almost phoenix like rebirth of each character in turn as the story moves forward, with occasional flashbacks to fill in missing info. I cheered Virgil as he regained speech, especially adjectives, after his near death experience. And i cheered the town on as it reinvented itself, but a lot of the symbolism will linger in my mind as cluesclues to the roadmap of personal identity. Beautifully written, almost poetic at times.
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