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Jun 07, 2020churchstreader rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
I loved this book. Chabon is such an engaging, quirky and wonderful writer. How well he draws his characters. These fictional people exist; I feel I've met Uncle Ray. Maybe it's because I grew up in an enigmatic and chaotic family that was sometimes intellectual, sometimes artistic, sometimes working class (sometimes wealthier and sometimes poorer), sometimes ordinary, sometimes extraordinary, a family with lots of strong characters like those Chabon writes about, and moved around in a lot of the US cities and their suburbs that Chabon writes about, amidst a similar New York/Baltimore/Pittsburghian gentile/Jewish milieu of this era, but I found these fictional characters very relatable. I loved the meandering. That is what life is like -- it gives a fuller picture not to distill it down. I loved the mix of audacity and the mundane here. Chabon, for me, is very much worth spending time with.